The Synthetic Biology Mashup is a weekly review of articles and news related to synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. While we share most of this on our twitter feed, if you need to catch up on this week’s news just read ahead!
From Natural Gas to Liquid Fuel Using Metabolic Engineering
In an article published this week in Science magazine, Rice University synthetic biologist Ramon Gonzalez and Robert Conrado, director and former senior fellow of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) discuss the critical steps that the U.S. should take in order to convert its abundant supply of natural gas into liquid transportation fuel. Gonzalez has developed a 3-year research program called “Reducing Emissions Using Methanotrophic Organisms for Transportation Energy” (REMOTE), which aims at using bioconversion technologies and synthetic biology to make “greener” fuel from the methane supply.
Mechanism of Cas9 Enzyme Activity Uncovered
The result of a collaboration between teams from Berkeley and Columbia Universities was published in Nature this week in an article demonstrating how the bacterial enzyme Cas9 finds specific DNA cleavage sites. Cas9 is able to target and cut DNA sequences guided by RNA during viral infections and can also induce the site-specific double stranded breaks in eukaryotic cells (CRISPR-Cas9 system). The study shows that both the binding and the catalytic activities of CAS9 require Protospacer Adjacent Motif (PAM). The CRISPR-Cas9 system has become a prominent genetic engineering tool and better understanding Cas9 mechanism should help fine-tune targeting specificity.
NASA new Synthetic Biology Initiative to focus to terraformation
The idea of sending engineered bacteria into space has become very popular lately, and is also part of Craig Venter’s latest research directions. Last Tuesday, NASA presented the latest developments of its new project, called Synthetic Biology Initiative, with the goal to design cyanobacteria that would be able to convert the toxic atmosphere of other planets in our solar system into breathable air using synthetic biology tools. The idea behind this terraformation project is to mimic the “Great Oxidation Event” that happen on Earth 2.45 billion years ago which created our breathable atmosphere following a cyanobacterial bloom.
That’s it for this week’s Synthetic Biology Mashup! A suggestion or a question? Shoot us an email!
