Table of Contents

A key functionality of proteins is based on their ability to form interactions with other proteins or peptides. These interactions are neither easily described nor fully understood, which is why the design of specific protein–protein interaction ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of endogenous short noncoding RNA. They regulate gene expression and function, essential to biological processes. It is necessary to develop an efficient detection method to determine these valuable biomarkers for the ...

We previously demonstrated that we could hijack the fungal pheromone signaling pathway to provide a living yeast biosensor where peptide biomarkers were recognized by G-protein-coupled receptors and engineered to transcribe a readout. Here, we ...

Deinococcus radiodurans’ high resistance to various stressors combined with its ability to utilize sustainable carbon sources makes it an attractive bacterial chassis for synthetic biology and industrial bioproduction. However, to fully harness the ...

The growth of biotechnology in recent decades and the dual-use nature of most bioscience research are making their misuse, or accidental misuse or release, more likely and present as threats to biosecurity. A proactive approach is through educating the ...

Globally, agriculture depends on industrial nitrogen fertilizer to improve crop growth. Fertilizer production consumes fossil fuels and contributes to environmental nitrogen pollution. A potential solution would be to harness nitrogenases—enzymes capable ...

Modulating the extracellular matrix microenvironment is critical for achieving the desired macrophage phenotype in immune investigations or tumor therapy. Combining de novo protein design and biosynthesis techniques, herein, we designed a biomimetic ...

Genetic variations such as mutations and recombinations arise spontaneously in all cultured organisms. Although it is possible to identify nonneutral mutations by selection or counterselection, the identification of neutral mutations in a heterogeneous ...

Bacterial infections are a major threat to the human healthcare system worldwide, as antibiotics are becoming less effective due to the emergence of multidrug-resistant strains. Therefore, there is a need to explore nontraditional antimicrobial ...

Vinblastine has been used clinically as one of the most potent therapeutics for the treatment of several types of cancer. However, the traditional plant extraction method suffers from unreliable supply, low abundance, and extremely high cost. Here, we use ...

Precision genome editing is highly desired for crop improvement. The recently emerged CRISPR/Cas technology offers great potential applications in precision plant genome engineering. A prime editing (PE) approach combining a reverse transcriptase (RT) ...

Plants adapt to their changing environments by sensing and responding to physical, biological, and chemical stimuli. Due to their sessile lifestyles, plants experience a vast array of external stimuli and selectively perceive and respond to specific ...

Cone snail venoms have been considered a valuable treasure for international scientists and businessmen, mainly due to their pharmacological applications in development of marine drugs for treatment of various human diseases. To date, around 800 Conus ...

The majority of marine microbes remain uncultured, which hinders the identification and mining of CO₂-fixing genes, pathways, and chassis from the oceans. Here, we investigated CO₂-fixing microbes in seawater from the euphotic zone of the Yellow Sea of ...

The ability to finely control the structure of protein folds is an important prerequisite to functional protein design. The TIM barrel fold is an important target for these efforts as it is highly enriched for diverse functions in nature. Although a TIM ...

Genetically engineered plants hold enormous promise for tackling global food security and agricultural sustainability challenges. However, construction of plant-based genetic circuitry is constrained by a lack of well-characterized genetic parts and ...

Despite extensive evidence of virus-virus interactions, not much is known about their biological significance. Importantly, virus-virus interactions could have evolved as a form of cooperation or simply be a by-product of other processes. Here, we review ...

ABC transporters are molecular machines which power the solute transport using ATP hydrolysis. The structural biology of ABC transporters has been exploding for the last few years, and this study explores timelines and trends for various attributes such ...

Synthetic biology is the process of forward engineering living systems. These systems can be used to produce biobased materials, agriculture, medicine, and energy. One approach to designing these systems is to employ techniques from the design of embedded ...

Fungi are nature’s recyclers, allowing for ecological nutrient cycling and, in turn, the continuation of life on Earth. Some fungi inhabit the human microbiome where they can provide health benefits, while others are opportunistic pathogens that can cause ...

The cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) system, as a technical core of synthetic biology, can simulate the transcription and translation process in an in vitro open environment without a complete living cell. It has been widely used in basic and applied ...

Ongoing pest and disease outbreaks pose a serious threat to human, crop, and animal lives, emphasizing the need for constant genetic discoveries that could serve as mitigation strategies. Gene drives are genetic engineering approaches discovered decades ...

The promiscuous conjugation machinery of the Gram-negative plasmid RP4 has been reassembled in a minimized, highly transmissible vector for propagating genetically encoded traits through diverse types of naturally occurring microbial communities. To this ...

Camelid single-domain antibody fragments (nanobodies) are an emerging force in therapeutic biopharmaceuticals and clinical diagnostic reagents in recent years. Nearly all nanobodies available to date have been obtained by animal immunization, a bottleneck ...

Maltose is a natural α-(1,4)-linked disaccharide with wide applications in food industries and microbial fermentation. However, maltose has scarcely been used for in vitro biosynthesis, possibly because its phosphorylation by maltose phosphorylase (MP) ...

Microbial cell factories (MCFs) are typical and widely used platforms in biomanufacturing for designing and constructing synthesis pathways of target compounds in microorganisms. In MCFs, transporter engineering is especially significant for improving the ...

Revolutionary breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have had a profound impact on a wide range of scientific disciplines, including the development of artificial cell factories for biomanufacturing. In this paper, we ...

The site-specific incorporation of the noncanonical amino acid (ncAA) into proteins via genetic code expansion (GCE) has enabled the development of new and powerful ways to learn, regulate, and evolve biological functions in vivo. However, cellular ...

Advancing biotechnologies are revolutionizing not only health and medicine, but also many different sectors such as agriculture, energy, chemistry, and textiles. As synthetic biology is leveraged as a programmable platform for the creation and biodesign ...

The emerging plant synthetic metabolic engineering has been exhibiting great promise to produce either value-added metabolites or therapeutic proteins. However, promoters for plant pathway engineering are generally selected empirically. The quantitative ...

Viral diseases have contributed significantly to worldwide morbidity and mortality throughout history. Despite the existence of therapeutic treatments for many viral infections, antiviral resistance and the threat posed by novel viruses highlight the need ...

All living organisms share similar reactions within their central metabolism to provide precursors for all essential building blocks and reducing power. To identify whether alternative metabolic routes of glycolysis can operate in E. coli, we ...

Recent years have witnessed a rise in methods for accurate prediction of structure and design of novel functional proteins. Design of functional protein fragments and peptides occupy a small, albeit unique, space within the general field of protein ...

A major advancement has recently occurred in the ability to predict protein secondary structure from sequence using artificial neural networks. This new accessibility to high-quality predicted structures provides a big opportunity for the protein design ...

The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation has continued to promote synthetic biology education throughout its 2021 competition. The 2021 Virtual iGEM Jamboree was the culmination of the competition’s growth, with 350 projects from ...

The overarching goal of computational protein design is to gain complete control over protein structure and function. The majority of sophisticated binders and enzymes, however, are large and exhibit diverse and complex folds that defy atomistic design ...

Photosynthetic terpene production represents one of the most carbon and energy-efficient routes for converting CO₂ into hydrocarbon. In photosynthetic organisms, metabolic engineering has led to limited success in enhancing terpene productivity, partially ...

Reducing crop loss to diseases is urgently needed to meet increasing food production challenges caused by the expanding world population and the negative impact of climate change on crop productivity. Disease-resistant crops can be created by expressing ...

It is vital to ramp up crop production dramatically by 2050 due to the increasing global population and demand for food. However, with the climate change projections showing that droughts and heatwaves becoming common in much of the globe, there is a ...

Hydrogel encapsulation has been widely utilized in the study of fundamental cellular mechanisms and has been shown to provide a better representation of the complex in vivo microenvironment in natural biological conditions of mammalian cells. In this ...

A grand challenge facing society is climate change caused mainly by rising CO₂ concentration in Earth’s atmosphere. Terrestrial plants are linchpins in global carbon cycling, with a unique capability of capturing CO₂ via photosynthesis and translocating ...

Plant-based bioproduction of insect sex pheromones has been proposed as an innovative strategy to increase the sustainability of pest control in agriculture. Here, we describe the engineering of transgenic plants producing (Z)-11-hexadecenol (Z11-16OH) ...

Light-regulated gene expression systems allow controlling gene expression in space and time with high accuracy. Contrary to previous synthetic light sensors that incorporate two-component systems which require localization at the plasma membrane, soluble ...

In the recent years, engineering new-to-nature CO₂- and C1-fixing metabolic pathways made a leap forward. New, artificial pathways promise higher yields and activity than natural ones like the Calvin-Benson-Bassham (CBB) cycle. The question remains how to ...

Development of CRISPR-based epigenome editing tools is important for the study and engineering of biological behavior. Here, we describe the design of a reporter system for quantifying the ability of CRISPR epigenome editors to produce a stable gene ...