Showing papers in "Current Opinion in Biotechnology in 1996"

TL;DR: The research field of protein adsorption on surfaces appears to be as popular as ever, with several hundred published papers tackled problems ranging from fundamental aspects of protein surface interactions to applied problems of surface blood compatibility and protein surface immobilization.

TL;DR: A number of genes for protein kinases and transcription factors thought to be involved in the stress signal transduction cascades have been shown to be induced by environmental stresses.

TL;DR: A flood of recent reports documenting the successful production of complex eukaryotic proteins in active form have demonstrated that bacteria can provide the proper environment for the folding of the vast majority of recombinant polypeptides.

TL;DR: Sphingomonas are also animal pathogens and can readily degrade the copper pipes in drinking water distribution systems, and the closely related Zymomonas could be important for commercial ethanol production.

TL;DR: The debate over the efficacy of bioaugmentation rages on, with research continuing to demonstrate that its advantages for soil bioremediation are difficult to predict; however, when it works, the results are often very encouraging.

TL;DR: Missense substitutions and processivity errors in the translation of heterologous proteins are expected to occur at higher frequencies than the corresponding errors of normal translation, and the resulting error-containing products may overload chaperone systems.

TL;DR: The known phylogenetic range of iron-reducing bacteria has expanded considerably, as has the known range of Iron minerals that serve as a source of Fe(III) for anaerobic respiration.

TL;DR: Escherichia coli has long been the primary prokaryotic host for the synthesis of heterologous proteins and the development of alternative promoter and induction strategies has improved the options available for manipulating the expression conditions, which are frequently critical to soluble yield.

TL;DR: Four solution structures of glycoproteins have been described and it was shown that glycosylation is stabilizing the glycoprotein structures, indicating that this may be a general glycan function.

TL;DR: It is shown that co-suppression and other types of post-transcriptional gene silencing in plants are initiated by homology-dependent pairing of transgene sequences, and the silencing mechanism acts in the cytoplasm to prevent accumulation of all RNAs with homology to thetransgene.

TL;DR: Yeast, especially Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris, are major hosts employed in the expression of authentic heterologous proteins of high quality in the biopharmaceutical, industrial and academic environments.

TL;DR: Xylanases are classified into two major families (10 or F and 11 or G) of glycosyl hydrolases, which are larger, more complex and produce smaller oligosaccharides.

TL;DR: Developments from the past year include ligand binding assays for morphine in aqueous buffers with similar specificity to antibody-based assays and the imprinting of cholesterol using a novel procedure in which the template is covalently bonded to the monomer during polymerization, but after cleavage, rebinds the polymer only by non-covalent interactions.

TL;DR: Random peptide libraries displayed on phage are used as a source of peptides for epitope mapping, for the identification of critical amino acids responsible for protein-protein interactions and as leads for the discovery of new therapeutics.

TL;DR: The cloning and sequencing of genes involved in the production of microbial metabolites playing key roles in plant defense opens new possibilities for improving the performance of biocontrol agents.

TL;DR: The active-site structure and catalytic mechanism appear to be common to a variety of phosphoesterase enzymes, and previous sequence comparisons and mutagenesis studies into a detailed structural perspective.

TL;DR: The pyrolysis mass spectrometry technique may be regarded as an 'anything-sensor' in the quantitative analysis of many diverse samples of biotechnological interest.

TL;DR: Most characteristics of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) are ideal for the analysis of biomolecules, making it a high-performance mass spectrometric technique for peptide mass analysis.

TL;DR: The capabilities of current protein structure prediction methods have been assessed from the outcome of a set of blind tests, and many of the numerical methods did not perform as well as expected, although the resulting structures are still of great practical use.

TL;DR: Progress continues in assessing the utility of near-infrared spectroscopy as a non-invasive probe for continuous bioreactor monitoring during fermentation processes, and demonstrates that five critical fermentation components, including glucose, may be measured simultaneously.

TL;DR: It is now proven that, besides toluene, benzene and ethylbenzene can be oxidized under anaerobic redox conditions.

TL;DR: The methylotrophic yeasts Hansenula polymorpha and Pichia pastoris are rapidly becoming the systems of choice for the expression of recombinant proteins in yeast and the powerful genetic techniques available in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the fission yeast are still exploited to establish models to study medically important cell processes and screen for pharmacologically active compounds.

TL;DR: Expressing proteins and polypeptides as fusions to Ubiquitin offers the advantage of an often dramatic increase in yield, and the ability to produce any desired amino-terminal residue upon ubiquitin cleavage.

TL;DR: In the field of Ras-related GTP-binding proteins, the past two years have seen significant advances in the molecular characterization of their putative effectors/downstream targets.

TL;DR: In addition to the widely used filamentous phage, other bacteriophage surface expression systems have now been developed, some of which may be of particular use for the selection of surface-display cDNA clones.

TL;DR: The most exciting current strategies are aimed at specifically designing new drugs that target telomerase or telomeres and new models have been formulated to study the biological effects of inhibitors of telomersase and telomere structures both in vitro and in vivo.

TL;DR: Progress has been made in the design of immunochemical approaches that permit the replacement of competitive format assays for small molecules with non-competitive formats, bringing advantages previously seen only with large molecular analytes.

TL;DR: Recent highlights include numerous studies of the structures adopted by short peptides, new approaches to correlating sequence patterns with structure patterns, and folding simulations using simple potentials.

TL;DR: There has been frequent speculation that TF has a role in intracellular signaling, a suggestion that is supported by some recent studies that propose a true receptor function for TF.

TL;DR: Results from studies have provided a better understanding of the potential for interactive effects in complex systems and may aid in the development of predictive models.