Sentences with phrase «engineering microbes»

He did his postdoctoral work in the lab of Jay Keasling, a pioneer of engineering microbes that consume renewable feedstock and spit out useful chemicals like diesel fuel or fragrance molecules for the cosmetics industry.

In his laboratory, students are engineering microbes to break down pesticides, make biodegradable plastics, and create ethanol and other fuels from plants.

The results offer a new strategy for engineering microbes, and they promise a potential safety switch that would make bugs die once they've done their job.

The difference between engineering microbes to produce drugs versus fuel is that, ounce for ounce, drugs are much more valuable: a fuel end product has to be cheap enough to burn.

Critical to this process of metabolically engineering microbes is the use of biosensors.

«You can do synthetic biology to produce a product, and they tend to be products either that evolution would not have selected for — like a fuel, for instance — or that evolution would not select to produce enough of — engineering microbes to produce artemisinin.»

The two Princeton Ph.D. s had an idea for a way to engineer a microbe that could build vast amounts of protein designed for specific functions.

Today scientists engineer microbes either by adding a few extra genes or fine - tuning the genes they already have, tinkering on top of nature's templates.

Cobbling together the genes of three different species, chemical engineer Jay Keasling (Discover's 2006 Scientist of the Year) of the University of California at Berkeley transformed a metabolic pathway in yeast that allows the engineered microbe to produce a precursor to artemisinin, a compound used to treat malaria.

But Keasling has estimated in the past that a mere 40.5 million hectares of Miscanthus giganteus — a more than three - meter tall Asian grass — chewed up by specially engineered microbes, like the E. coli here, could produce enough fuel to meet all U.S. transportation needs.

Fortunately, imagining custom - engineered microbes is far easier than actually producing, maintaining, handling, and dispersing them.

«Our ultimate goal is to engineer microbes to make new versions of these antibiotics for our use, which will drastically reduce the amount of time and money necessary for new drug testing and development,» says Gavin Williams, associate professor of bio-organic chemistry at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the research.

A top - secret government lab might be her savior: Sophie is hired to fly across the Earth spraying a genetically engineered microbe that eats plastic.

The findings could also lead to new applications in environmental monitoring using genetically engineered microbes to issue warning signals in the presence of pollutants or toxins, and could unlock new fundamental insights into metabolic pathways.

The Wyss team aims to leverage the new biosensors to aid in their efforts to develop renewable chemical production strategies using genetically engineered microbes.

And biotechnology companies such as Amyris and LS9 are generating genetically engineered microbes that can churn out specific hydrocarbon molecules.

Though the researchers successfully tested their engineered microbe on P. aeruginosa, they say that their engineering strategy could be used to combat other pathogens as well.

A new company has found a way to produce polymers from genetically engineered microbes that feed on sugars, replacing fossil - fuel based processes

For example, the metabolically engineered microbes that are sometimes used to produce biofuels and chemicals are currently subject to genetically modified organism (GMO) regulations, while the molecules they produce are subject to chemical regulations such as the Toxic Substances Control Act in the United States and the regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) in Europe.

More recently, researchers have been trying to engineer microbes to generate more complex products, including pharmaceuticals and biofuels.

Now researchers may have found a way to combat this waste buildup by using a genetically engineered microbe that resists radioactivity and breaks down chemicals at the sites.

Keasling has estimated that in the past such engineered microbes would need to chew up only 40.5 million hectares — roughly one quarter of the current amount of land devoted to raising crops in the U.S. — of a common tall Asian grass to produce enough fuel to meet all of the U.S.'s transportation needs.

But genetically engineered microbes may one day keep that from happening if researchers in the United Kingdom are successful.

Now, researchers have engineered microbes that, when added to soil, make fertilizer on demand, producing plants that grow 1.5 times larger than crops not exposed to the bugs or other synthetic fertilizers.

Though a new generation of genetically engineered microbes is raising fears about home - brew heroin, a technology de-coupled from the whims of growing seasons could also mean cheaper, legal drugs.

However, the interpretation of large omics data and the understanding of complex metabolic interactions in engineered microbes remains challenging.

Most modern biologics are assembled inside vats — or bioreactors — that house genetically engineered microbes or mammalian cell cultures.

In my lab we engineer microbes so that they can not only synthesize new proteins and other molecular building blocks, but also orchestrate the assembly of those building blocks into higher order structures and functional materials.

Researchers there are engineering a microbe that combines the last two stages of ethanol production: converting cellulose into sugar, and turning sugar into ethanol.

Though a new generation of genetically engineered microbes is raising fears about home - brew heroin, a technology de-coupled from the whims of growing seasons could also mean cheaper, legal drugs.

Late last month, Amyris Biotechnologies opened a plant in Campinas, Brazil, to demonstrate large - scale production of hydrocarbons from sugarcane processed using its engineered microbes.

Not exact matches

«By understanding how microbes work and modifying the environments where they function, we can eventually engineer microbial communities to enhance soil productivity.

From Sewers to Streetlights, Microbes Are Grabbing Civil Engineers» Attention An understanding of how to cultivate a healthy «microbiome» in our living areas is now getting off the ground, boosted by next - generation DNA sequencing technologies.

That natural microbes are better than human mop - up efforts may come as a surprise, considering that for decades, genetic engineers have touted the creation of an oil - gobbling superbug — the first patent issued for a genetically modified organism was for such a hydrocarbon - chewing microbe.

For instance, a patient could swallow bacteria engineered to create gas pockets wherever the microbes sense inflammation.

When these bacteria are placed inside an animal, an ultrasound detector can pick up those signals and reveal the microbes» location, much like sonar waves bouncing off ships at sea, explains study coauthor Mikhail Shapiro, a chemical engineer at Caltech.

But a genetically engineered form of a microbe found in some dairy products could trick intestine cells into making much - needed insulin.

The robots then explore and tinker with each microbe's genome in a bid to engineer a version that makes its product compound more efficiently.

Security experts have long warned that would - be terrorists no longer need to steal deadly pathogens when commonplace genetic engineering techniques could turn a benign microbe into a killer or synthetic biology tools might be used to build a virus from scratch.

Genetically engineered vaccines incorporate genetic pieces of a deadly microbe to stimulate the immune system, without the danger of infection.

«The large communities of microbes residing on and inside us are critical to our state of health or illness,» said Borenstein, a University of Washington assistant professor of genome sciences and computer science and engineering, who conducted the study with his graduate student, Roie Levy.

The researchers are collaborating with an engineering company, Intrinsyx Technologies, to show this same beneficial relationship between microbes and agricultural plants, with crops given the beneficial microbes yielding more vegetables and responding better in dry, hot weather.

Bioprocess engineer Rafael Garcia of ARS and biochemical engineer Zhiyou Wen of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg are designing a study to grow EPA - and DHA - producing microbes using low - cost by - products of other processes, such as glycerol from biodiesel production and rendered animal protein from slaughterhouses.

The company plans to work with genetic engineers at DuPont to further perfect the microbe — programming it to produce biobutanol.

Microbes vs. Disease, Round IV Your typical vaccine is engineered to prevent trouble before it starts.

Microbes vs. Disease, Round III By modifying a few genes in adenoviruses (which bring us the common cold), scientists at Introgen Therapeutics are engineering weapons against cancer.

Venter says that his newest company, Synthetic Genomics in La Jolla, Calif., is well on its way to overcoming one of the hurdles: his microbes can be reused multiple times because he has engineered them to release fat rather than store it.

Microbes are perfect little factories because they can be engineered to perform practically any chemical reaction.

Indeed, biofuels aren't really a stretch — humans have been using microorganisms to ferment plants into ethanol ever since Stone Age people began making beer around 10,000 B.C. Today's work hinges on engineering a perfect microbe that will eat the entirety of a plant, retain only a little of this food for itself and spew out the rest as a high - energy fuel.

To better understand how changes in diet, lifestyle, and exposure to modern medicine affect primates» guts, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota computer science and engineering professor Dan Knights, veterinary medicine professor Tim Johnson, and veterinary medicine Ph.D. student Jonathan Clayton, used DNA sequencing to study the gut microbes of multiple non-human primates species in the wild and in captivity as a model for studying the effects of emigration and lifestyle changes.