Showing papers in "Current Opinion in Biotechnology in 2005"

TL;DR: Unraveling additional stress-associated gene resources, from both crop plants and highly salt- and drought-tolerant model plants, will enable future molecular dissection of salt-tolerance mechanisms in important crop plants.

TL;DR: Progress in developing CBP-enabling microorganisms is being made through two strategies: engineering naturally occurring cellulolytic microorganisms to improve product-related properties, such as yield and titer, and engineering non-cellulolytic organisms that exhibit high product yields and titers to express a heterologous cellulase system enabling cellulose utilization.

TL;DR: A new structural design involves encapsulating luminescent QDs with amphiphilic block copolymers and linking the polymer coating to tumor-targeting ligands and drug delivery functionalities, which raised new possibilities for ultrasensitive and multiplexed imaging of molecular targets in living cells, animal models and possibly in humans.

TL;DR: Efficient sampling of mutations likely to affect enzyme function has been conducted both experimentally and computationally, with remarkable improvements in substrate selectivity and specificity and in the de novo design of enzyme activities within scaffolds of known structure.

TL;DR: This work has shown that there has been a recent explosion in the use of metallic nanostructures to favorably modify the spectral properties of fluorophores and to alleviate some of these fluorophore photophysical constraints.

TL;DR: The widening application of FRET and FLIM has been driven by the availability of suitable fluorophores, increasingly sophisticated microscopy systems, methodologies to correct spectral bleed-through, and the ease with which FRET can be combined with other techniques.

TL;DR: In a plant that naturally hyperaccumulates zinc in leaves, approximately ten key metal homeostasis genes are expressed at very high levels, which outlines the extent of change in gene activities needed in the engineering of transgenic plants for soil clean-up.

TL;DR: The claimed health benefits of fermented functional foods are expressed either directly through the interaction of ingested live microorganisms, bacteria or yeast with the host or indirectly as a result of ingestion of microbial metabolites produced during the fermentation process.

TL;DR: Insight into the diversity and function of the human intestinal microbiota has been stimulated by clinical studies with bacteria that exhibit specific functions and which are marketed as probiotics to positively affect the authors' health.

TL;DR: Rhodococcus appear to have adopted a strategy of hyper-recombination associated with a large genome that contributes to their catabolic diversity by acting as 'mass storage' for a large number of catabolic genes.

TL;DR: The principal bottleneck for the utilization of small-molecule probes in live cells is the shortage of methodologies for targeting them with very high specificity to biological molecules or compartments of interest.

TL;DR: The use of seeds for the production of pharmaceutical proteins, particularly replacement human proteins, recombinant antibodies and (oral) vaccines, has been explored, and the first commercial products have already reached the market.

TL;DR: Fungi provide a readily available alternative source of naturally derived food colorants that could easily be produced in high yields and with advances in gene technology, in the future it should be possible to employ metabolic engineering to create microbial cell factories for the production of foodcolorants.

TL;DR: A provisional mechanistic model is proposed to account for macromolecular lignin assembly through the participation of proteins harboring arrays of dirigent (monolignol radical binding) sites.

TL;DR: Key technical achievements include miniaturization, enhanced depth resolution, reduction of detection volumes and the combination of TIRFM with other microscopic techniques.

TL;DR: The expression of heterologous secreted proteins in Escherichia coli is widely employed for laboratory and preparative purposes and protein design and directed evolution approaches are beginning to be exploited for engineering of the cellular protein folding machinery to achieve further improvements in protein expression.

TL;DR: This work focuses on the design and implementation of high-throughput GPCR functional assays that allow the cost-effective screening of large compound libraries to identify novel drug candidates.

TL;DR: The past three years have seen an array of novel technological developments that have led to the first optical tomographic studies of small animals in the areas of cerebral ischemia and cancer.

TL;DR: The development of contrast agents that can be localized to a particular tissue or cellular epitope will potentially allow the noninvasive visualization and characterization of a variety of disease states as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: Rational and evolutionary engineering approaches have started to yield more robust and versatile enzyme systems, broadening the alkane oxygenase portfolio, and metagenomic approaches provide access to many novel alkane hydroxylases sequences.

TL;DR: An area of intense scientific and practical interest is the biogeochemical and microbial processes determining the success of natural attenuation, biostimulation and/or bioaugmentation treatments for organic contaminants in groundwater.

TL;DR: This work has shown that state-of-the art genomics tools can be combined with metabolic profiling to identify key genes that could be engineered for the production of improved crop plants.

TL;DR: This work has shown that modulation of the intestinal microbiota by exogenous and endogenous substrates can be expected to improve various physiological functions of the body, not just those in the intestine.

TL;DR: Research on hydrophobins has contributed to a better understanding of the self-assembly process and is generating more handles to control and manipulate the process, which could have an immediate effect on production levels, which are not yet adequate, and provide the boost needed to reach their full potential.

TL;DR: This review discusses recent reports on the heterologous production of natural products with emphasis on polyketide and nonribosomally biosynthesized peptide compounds and the lateral transfer of 'silent' secondary metabolite pathways or metagenomic DNA into surrogate host strains is expected to yield new, potentially bioactive compounds.

TL;DR: Protein engineering offers powerful solutions to the challenges posed by the creation of well-defined, multifunctional materials that guide cell and tissue behavior in reconstructive surgery, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

TL;DR: This work investigates the microbial colonization of radioactive environments and the biological basis of microbial transformations of radioactive waste in these settings through the use of nanofiltration and X-ray diffraction analysis.

TL;DR: A mechanistic understanding of the sigmaB activation processes and assessment of its regulon could provide tools for pathogen control and inactivation both in the food industry and clinical settings.

TL;DR: An increased understanding of other natural binding proteins together with advances in protein engineering, selection and evolution technologies has also triggered the exploration of numerous other protein architectures for the generation of designed binding molecules.

TL;DR: Insight has been provided into how some fibrous proteins assemble and how they function in biology and efforts are increasingly being made to employ protein fibers as performance molecules in man-made medical and technical applications.