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Rod-shaped Escherichia coli bacteria against a background of metabolic pathways. Liao and colleagues introduce pathways into bacteria to convert amino acids into alcohol biofuels (p 346). Credit: Marina Corral; based on false-colored scanning electron micrograph by David Scharf (Getty Images).
With the economy sputtering toward recovery, federal outlays shriveling and the political scene in upheaval, the US biotech policy picture is more than a little blurred. Jeffrey L. Fox reports.
Delivery of therapeutic siRNA to specific tissues is a major challenge. Alvarez-Erviti et al. show that exosomes—small vesicles that are naturally secreted by many animal cells—can be engineered to transport siRNA specifically to the brain in mice.
Proteins have been largely unexplored as feedstocks for synthesizing fuels and chemicals in microbes, in part because their degradation is not thermodynamically favored in the cell. Huo et al. overcome this by engineering nitrogen flux in E. coli, creating microbes that generate biofuels when grown in protein-rich medium.
The inadvertent cutting of nerves is a common adverse event during surgery. To ease visual identification of nerve fibers, Whitney et al. use phage display to develop a peptide that specifically stains peripheral nerves in living mice and in human tissue samples.
Methods to measure affinities of membrane proteins and soluble ligands are cumbersome and often rely on truncations or other modifications of the membrane protein or ligand. Baksh et al. show that backscattering interferometry is a sensitive and accurate technology for the label-free quantification of ligand–membrane receptor interactions.
Essential genes have been effectively studied using temperature-sensitive alleles in yeast. Li et al. construct a large collection of temperature-sensitive yeast mutants and show how it enables high-throughput analyses of the function of essential genes.
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