Synthetic Biology

By expanding beyond the normal dictionary, researchers at Scripps University have created a portable system for creating proteins with unnatural amino acids

In a breakthrough for synthetic biology, an international team of researchers constructed a functioning yeast genome where more than half of its chromosomes were made in a lab.

Scientists have developed a biodegradable ultrasound speaker that can be placed inside the brain. When activated, it makes the blood-brain barrier permeable, potentially allowing certain drugs such as brain cancer chemotherapy and antidepressants to…

Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital engineered a unique medicine to treat a young girl's disease: they reverse engineered a blocker from her DNA to inhibit the gene causing the disease.

Type II diabetes is a rising global epidemic without any current treatments. But scientists have designed an interesting chimeric protein that aims to increase insulin sensitivity in patients and thereby provide a potential cure.

Researchers from MIT have developed a novel method to locally deliver drugs and prevent immune activity around implanted biomedical devices over several months. The method is based on the formation of crystals of immunosuppressive drugs, which can be…

Proteins are made up of linear sequences of amino acids but understanding how these amino acids fold to form a three-dimensional structure is notoriously difficult. Knowing what a protein looks like in 3D is often necessary for understanding how it…

Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine have developed a system capable of sustaining certain aspects of brain function for several hours, even if the host animal has been dead for up to four hours beforehand. While this by no means suggests that…

Each cell in a living organism has an instruction manual known as the genome. These instructions are spelled out using letters, called bases, that pair with one another to form long double-stranded molecules of helical DNA. Life as we know it uses 4…

Nerve agents are toxic chemicals that disrupt signals in the nervous system. They can be absorbed easily through skin contact or by breathing. Exposure to nerve agents interferes with nerve cell signaling and prevents muscles from relaxing, quickly…