Life Sciences and Chemistry

Bioengineers at Dartmouth have genetically engineered yeast to produce humanized therapeutic proteins to address the manufacturing crunch currently confronting the biopharmaceutical industry. Reported in this week’s issue of Science, the researchers have re-engineered the yeast P. pastoris to secrete a complex human glycoprotein–a process offering significant advantages over current production methods using mammalian cell lines, according to the researchers.

The study, titled “Production

Get a whiff of this! A new research partnership at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using beams of chilled neutrons to determine how aroma compounds are embedded into assortments of other chemicals that carry and release fragrances in perfumes, detergents and other scented products.

Securing the elusive structural details could lead to what might be termed an “odor of magnitude” improvement in models for predicting interactions between fragrances and their molecul

Findings could drive new tissue engineering applications, organ repair and high-strength materials

Tufts University bioengineers have discovered how spiders and silkworms are able to spin webs and cocoons made of incredibly strong fibers. The answer lies in how they control the silk protein solubility and structural organization in their glands.

“This finding could lead to the development of processing methods resulting in new high-strength and high-performance materials use

The tedious laboratory trial-and-error method for refining protein/peptide-based medicines could be accelerated and complemented by an innovative in silico (on computer) protein design method, according to researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the University of California at Riverside.

Their findings, appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could drastically decrease the time it takes to move potentia

A First Step Toward Robots the Size of a Grain of Sand

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have developed minute grains of silicon that spontaneously assemble, orient and sense their local environment, a first step toward the development of robots the size of sand grains that could be used in medicine, bioterrorism surveillance and pollution monitoring.

In a paper to be published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which will

What can bees teach us about speed shopping?
Does trading off speed for accuracy pay?

“Bumblebees have been shown to have very fine colour vision – which they can use to find up to 5,000 flowers a day,” says says Melbourne scientist Adrian Dyer who first made the observations whilst working in Germany.

Adrian’s study published in Nature casts light on how they do it – and may help us to learn from the bees how to design robot eyes in the future.

Adrian is