News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A research team at Kobe University has developed a method of artificially controlling the anchorage position of target proteins in engineered baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). The group demonstrated that this technique could be utilized to improve the amount of ethanol produced from hydrothermally processed rice straw by 30%. It is expected that these results will contribute to improved yeast functionality in cell surface engineering, which is utilized in a variety of fields such as bio-production and medicine.

Purdue University researchers are aiming to stump drug counterfeiters with an edible 'security tag' embedded into medicine. To imitate the drug, a counterfeiter would have to uncrack a complicated puzzle of patterns not fully visible to the naked eye.

The giant squid is an elusive giant, but its secrets are about to be revealed. A new study led by the University of Copenhagen has sequenced the creature's entire genome, offering an opportunity to throw some light on its life in the depths of the sea.

Researchers were able to track the activity of each neuron in the entire brain of zebrafish larvae and reconstruct the unfolding of neuronal events as the animals repeatedly made 'left or right' choices in a behavioral experiment. The resulting frame-by-frame view of a decision in the making was so detailed that, 10 seconds before the fish responded, the researchers could predict what their next move will be and when they would execute it.

Biomarkers are essential in order to develop clinically-approved interventions for human aging and age-related diseases. We live too long to wait for results to be validated in traditional methods. The stage is now set to develop senescence-based biomarkers of aging. Senescent cells are long-recognized drivers of multiple diseases of aging. The Proteomic Atlas of Senescence-Associated Secretomes, developed at the Buck Institute, is available to the research community to speed translation of therapeutics to clinical use.

The method melds the best of super-resolution fluorescence and electron microscopy to show how proteins relate to cells' ultrastructure.