ERIK CARLSONScientists from the University of Illinois, Chicago, have synthesized ribosomes composed of two designer subunits for the purposes of learning more about how these cellular machines work and for potential synthetic biology applications. Their results were published in Nature this week (July 29).
“It’s a key advance in understanding ribosome [function] and also in establishing a path to fundamentally alter the catalytic center of the ribosome . . . which will really allow you to start introducing new types of chemistries [and] producing entirely new classes of synthetic polymers,” said Farren Isaacs of Yale University who was not involved in the work.
“This was not a casual weekend experiment. This was a major effort,” said Harry Noller of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who also was not involved in the research.
FLICKR, NIAIDResearchers are making progress toward vaccines to prevent and therapies to treat Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), as evidenced by two papers published in PNAS (July 27) and Nature Communications (July 28) this week. Despite these successes, those working to prevent and treat MERS face perhaps the greatest challenge: finding funding to move their experimental candidates into later-stage clinical trials.
“You have to get support from either a company or a ...
