Engineering tools for Gram positive bacteria
Gram positive bacteria like Bacillus subtilis provide a number of benefits for synthetic biologists. B. subtilis is non-tranformable and naturally transformable, with an efficient system for homologous transformation. Gram positive bacteria provide the bulk of industrially important species and their architectures allow high level secretion of enzymes and other proteins. The Synthetic Biology group at the University of Cambridge is developing tools for work with B. subtilis. The pages in this section provide access to recent papers and relevant websites in the field.
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A bout of Salmonella food poisoning isn’t a pretty affair. Your digestive tract churns, you can’t keep your food down, and you feel exhausted. But you aren’t the only one affected. Your gut contains trillions of bacteria, which outnumber your own cells by ten to one. They are your partners in life, and they are also transformed by the presence of the invading Salmonella.
Minority...
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Researchers engineer microbe to make seaweed a cost-effective source of renewable fuel: "
One of the biggest criticisms leveled at biofuels that are derived from crops such as wheat, corn and sugar cane, is that they result in valuable land being taken away from food production. For this reason there are various research efforts underway to turn seaweed into a viable renewable source of...
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[Research highlight] Laws of microbial growth:
In a work recently published in Science, Scott et al reveal a series of microbial "growth laws" that describe simple relationships between translation, nutrition, and cellular growth. They show that these laws hold across different experimental perturbations and E. coli strains, and, ultimately, provide a phenomenological model describing the...
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1. I Spy Researchers testing the ability of engineered E. colicells to stabilize unstable proteins in vivo, stumbled upon a new protein chaperone called Spy that suppresses protein aggregation and aids protein refolding. Spy is shaped unlike any other previously studied chaperone and can increase the steady-state levels of a set of unstable protein mutants up to 700-fold.
S. Quan et al.,...
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Diatomists shell out on nanotechnology
It's unlikely that many nanotechnologists are familiar with diatoms - a group of single-celled shelled algae - but that could change following a world-first conference on diatom nanotechnology that's set to take place in the US in October. Liz Kalaugher spoke to conference organizer Richard Gordon of the University of Manitoba, Canada, to find out more....
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The Colors Of Microbiology: Bacteria, Fungi & More
By evad // August 26, 2008
11 comments
From: http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/08/26/the-colors-of-microbiology-bacteria-fungi/
The color of micro-organisms (fungi, bacteria, algae, and such) is due to different colored substances in the cells. For instance, bacteria use variants of chlorophyll (the green in...
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Self-organization, layered structure, and aggregation enhance persistence of a synthetic biofilm consortium.:
PLoS One. 2011;6(2):e16791
Authors: Brenner K, Arnold FH
Microbial consortia constitute a majority of the earth's biomass, but little is known about how these cooperating communities persist despite competition among community members. Theory suggests that non-random spatial...
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Biotechnol J. 2010 Dec;5(12):1277-96
Authors: Fischbach M, Voigt CA
Bacteria construct elaborate nanostructures, obtain nutrients and energy from diverse sources, synthesize complex molecules, and implement signal processing to react to their environment. These complex phenotypes require the coordinated action of multiple genes, which are often encoded in a contiguous region of the genome,...
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Biomaterials. 2011 Apr;32(10):2500-7
Authors: Choi WS, Ha D, Park S, Kim T
We utilized a commercially available materials printer to investigate synthetic multicellular cell-to-cell communication because inkjet printing technology makes it easy to print spatiotemporal patterns of soluble biomolecules and live cells. Since cells are genetically programmed to communicate with one another via...
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Bacteria are widely used to manufacture proteins used in medicine and industry, but the bugs often bungle the job. Many proteins fall apart and get cut up inside the bacteria before they can be harvested. Others collapse into useless tangles instead of folding properly, as they must in order to function normally.
A research team led by James Bardwell, who is a professor of molecular, cellular...
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