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Education is a central mission of universities. Emphasizing creative and passionate teaching by all academic staff is essential for maintaining educational quality while supporting vigorous research.
The biology of RNA interference has greatly facilitated analysis of loss-of-function phenotypes, but correlating these phenotypes with small-molecule inhibition profiles is not always straightforward. We examine the rationale of comparing RNA interference to pharmacological intervention in chemical biology.
There is a gap between the nanoscale level of molecular structure and the micron-sized level of cellular ultrastructure that is difficult to probe experimentally. New techniques and simulated images are revealing its secrets.
By questioning the very nature of how ion channels, brains and societies form and function, Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn has changed our understanding of the chemical basis of self-organization.
A continual commitment to exploring new scientific territory has led Pamela Silver on an oscillating path from physics and engineering to molecular biology and now to the development of engineering principles in the creation of cellular metrics.
Understanding how organisms measure and respond to space and time at a physical and chemical level is at the heart of a mechanistic understanding of life.
Animals time events on scales that span from microseconds to days. In contrast to the technologies devised by humans to keep track of time, biology has developed vastly different mechanisms for timing across these different scales.
Live samples are intrinsically highly dynamic, yet techniques to monitor these complex environments usually reflect snapshots, thus making time-lapse imaging necessary to explore temporal progression of biological functions. Recent results indicate that exploiting some basic features of fluorescent protein maturation, such as green-to-red maturation of engineered proteins, should allow probing of temporally regulated information.
The world's first synthetic biology department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is using a bottom-up approach to form a foundation of design rules and models to understand cellular function.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the development of a radical new direction in chemistry: instead of simply analyzing existing molecules, chemists began to synthesize them—including molecules that did not exist in nature. The combination of this new synthetic approach with more traditional analytical approaches revolutionized chemistry, leading to a deep understanding of the fundamental principles of chemical structure and reactivity and to the emergence of the modern pharmaceutical and chemical industries. The history of synthetic chemistry offers a possible roadmap for the development and impact of synthetic biology, a nascent field in which the goal is to build novel biological systems.
