Category Biology/Biotechnology

The researcher’s model of a yeast cell (magenta) with semiconductor nanoparticles (purple) attached to its surface (left) corresponds with their SEM analysis of the completed biohybrid system (right). The semiconductors capture electrons from light and hand them over to the cell where they drive the shikimic acid metabolic pathway.
Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Scientists presents a highly adaptable solution to creating yeast biohybrids with enhanced metabolism driven by light energy. Genetically engineered microbes such as bacteria and yeasts have long been used as living factories to produce drugs and fine chemicals...

Rice University bioengineers use a magnetic field to activate nanoparticle-attached baculoviruses in a tissue. The viruses, which normally infect alfalfa looper moths, are modified to deliver gene-editing DNA code only to cells that are targeted with magnetic field-induced local transduction.
Credit: Laboratory of Biomolecular Engineering and Nanomedicine/Rice University

Experimental therapy could repair mutations that cause genetic diseases. Bioengineers have combined a virus that infects moths with magnetic nanoparticles to create a potential new therapy for inherited genetic diseases like muscular dystrophy, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and some forms of cancer.

Rice University bioengineer Gang Bao has combined magnetic nanoparticles with a viral container drawn ...

Tractor spraying a wheat field. Credit: © Dusan Kostic / Fotolia

Use of organophosphates has lessened, but risks to early brain development still too high. Public health experts have found there is sufficient evidence that prenatal exposure to widely used insecticides known as organophosphates puts children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.

In a scientific review and call to action published in PLOS Medicine, the researchers call for immediate government intervention to phase out all organophosphates...

Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, this janus gamma peptide nucleic acid (PNA) can invade the double helix of DNA and RNA.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a synthetic molecule that can recognize and bind to double-stranded DNA or RNA under normal physiological conditions. It could provide a new platform for developing methods for the diagnosis and treatment of genetic conditions. Their findings are published in Communications Chemistry, a new Nature journal.

The work was carried out by an international team of experts, including Carnegie Mellon Professor of Chemistry Danith Ly, an expert in peptide nucleic acid design, chemistry postdoc Shivaji Thadke and chemistry graduate student Dinithi Perera, Chemistry Profes...