News & Events
During his expeditions on the HMS Beagle from 1832 to 1836, the young Charles Darwin described specific rock formations off the coast of South America as “black glittering rock” that “glitters most brilliantly when turned before light” (1). The shiny rock is now commonly known as desert varnish or rock varnish and is found across the globe in arid climates, largely in desert landscapes.
Phage therapy—the use of bacterial viruses to treat bacterial infections—is one of the most promising solutions to the antibiotic resistance crisis. Phage therapy has been used to combat bacterial infections for over a century, and has successfully cleared life-threatening multidrug-resistant infections from patients after all chemical antibiotics have failed (1). However, one of the biggest hurdles to successful deployment of phage therapy in the clinic is bacterial phage resistance.
Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental efort1–4 , the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined5 , but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences6,7 . Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking efort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics.
The Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) QU Dongyu emphasized the role of young people as a key driver towards the transformation of agri-food systems and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, as he spoke today at the Y20 Summit, the official G20 engagement group for youth.
In the first report, researchers demonstrated the ability to turn off variable numbers of copies of the magnesium chelatase gene, a key enzyme for chlorophyll biosynthesis in sugarcane, producing rapidly identifiable plants with light green to yellow leaves. Plants with light green leaves did not show growth reduction and may require less nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same amount of biomass.
The industrial yeast Pichia pastoris has been harnessed extensively for production of proteins, and it is attracting attention as a chassis cell factory for production of chemicals. However, the lack of synthetic biology tools makes it challenging in rewiring P. pastoris metabolism. We here extensively engineered the recombination machinery by establishing a CRISPR-Cas9 based genome editing platform
A group of researchers led by Prof. Zhou Yongjin from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has created an efficient engineering platform in methylotrophic yeast (Pichia pastoris) to boost protein and chemical production for industrial enzymes and the biopharmaceutical industry.
An international team of researchers from Denmark, Finland, Germany, the UK, and Canada led by the Universities of Helsinki and Copenhagen as well as Luke Natural Resources Institute Finland has identified the gene responsible for the production of harmful compounds in protein-rich faba beans.
We searched for the genetic basis of fatty acid content variation by genotyping 601 inbred sunflower lines and assessing their lipid and fatty acid composition. Our genome-wide association analysis based on the genotypes for 15,483 SNPs and the concentrations of 23 fatty acids, including minor fatty acids, revealed significant genetic associations for eleven of them.
The Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO Panel) has released a scientific opinion on the data submitted for the renewal of authorization application for herbicide tolerant genetically modified cotton GHB614 for food and feed uses. The scope of the renewal application EFSA–GMO–RX–018 is for the renewal of the placing on the market of products containing, consisting of, or produced from cotton GHB614, excluding cultivation within the European Union (EU).
A team of researchers from Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and from the University of Southern California has identified the genetic markers that could help predict the composition of sunflower oil using genetic analysis. The researchers used bioinformatics analysis to study 601 lines of cultivated sunflower from two major Russian gene banks and Agroplasma's collection.
The industrial yeast Pichia pastoris has been harnessed extensively for production of proteins, and it is attracting attention as a chassis cell factory for production of chemicals. However, the lack of synthetic biology tools makes it challenging in rewiring P. pastoris metabolism. We here extensively engineered the recombination machinery by establishing a CRISPR-Cas9 based genome editing platform,