Tag: Synthetic Biology

Covid has turned our focus to human viral pathogens, but the challenges we face from cellular pathogens has not gone away, and is increasingly exacerbated by the development of resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials. This fine review by Tiwari et al. provides an overview of how antimicrobials…

Sophia G. Zebell Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA [email protected] Over the past 10 years, utilization of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in plants has rapidly and significantly altered the scale and scope of both basic research and crop development.…

I guess if this were a normal year, we’d be spending time looking back over the past decade, but Covid-19 has made anything pre-2019 seem like a different lifetime. Still, here’s a retrospective you don’t want to miss. Meng and Ellis take us on a short walk down memory lane through the “second…

Tianhu Sun ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2513-1387 Plant Breeding and Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 [email protected] Astaxanthin is the reddish carotenoid pigment that gives color to shrimp, salmon, and flamingo. However, these animals…

Martin-Avila et al. use synthetic biology to improve photosynthesis in tobacco by swapping out the endogenous small subunits of Rubisco for one coming from potato, among other things. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.20.00288 By Spencer Whitney, Elena Martin-Avila, Sally Buck, Timothy Rhodes,…

Dhineshkumar Thiruppathi 1,2  ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2018-3356 Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri 63132 1Lead author 2Author for contact: [email protected] The phytohormone auxin plays a major part in nearly every plant process, including growth…

In an interesting evolutionary artifact, the genes encoding the small subunit of Rubisco, rbcS, reside in the nuclear genome, whilst those encoding RbcL persists in the chloroplast. The RbcS protein is translocated into the chloroplast where the holoenzyme forms. This complexity adds to the challenge…

Some of the most promising applications in synthetic biology need precise control of gene expression. For instance, metabolic engineering in plants requires the expression of enzyme-coding genes at a precise time, space, and quantity to ensure correct output. Recently, Belcher, Vuu, and colleagues engineered…