Gregory Bokinsky

TL;DR: The engineering of Escherichia coli is demonstrated to produce structurally tailored fatty esters (biodiesel), fatty alcohols, and waxes directly from simple sugars, a step towards producing these compounds directly from hemicellulose, a major component of plant-derived biomass.

TL;DR: The engineered strains express cellulase, xylanase, beta-glucosidase, and xylobiosidase enzymes under control of native E. coli promoters selected to optimize growth on model cellulosic and hemicellulosic substrates and provide an economical route to production of advanced biofuels.

TL;DR: The authors' single-molecule experiments in conjunction with site-specific mutations and metal ion titrations show that the two RNA domains are in a contact or close-to-contact configuration in the transition state even though the native tertiary contacts are at most partially formed, which may be a general property of elementary RNA folding reactions.

TL;DR: Different orientational dynamics of reverse transcriptase observed on different substrates with a single-molecule assay indicate that the activities of reverse transcripts are determined by its binding orientation on substrates.

TL;DR: It is proposed that a network of coupled molecular motions connects distant parts of the RNA with its reaction site, which suggests a previously undescribed analogy between RNA and protein enzymes.