Darpa has launched a “Living Foundries” program to bring an engineering perspective to synthetic biology to greatly accelerate progress through standardization and modularization.
Darpa has launched a “Living Foundries” program to bring an engineering perspective to synthetic biology to greatly accelerate progress through standardization and modularization.
Recent interview touches on new Foresight programs and issues in nanotechnology development
A set of machine learning programs can now predict properties of small organic molecules as accurately as can calculations based upon the Schrödinger equation, but in milliseconds rather than hours.
Foldit game players have again out-performed scientists in protein design, this time improving the design of a protein designed from scratch to catalyze Diels-Alder cycloadditions.
An article in The Guardian quotes Christine Peterson and Robert Freitas on the vision of molecular manufacturing. Freitas is quoted as expecting that the development of nanofactories could be done in 20 years for “on the order of” one billion dollars.
A four-step unidirectional molecular motor driven by light and temperature changes catalyzes different chemical reactions at different steps of its rotary cycle.
The oscillating synthesis and degradation of regulatory RNA molecules was used to produce a molecular clock to control the opening and closing of a DNA tweezers, and also to control the production of another RNA molecule to alter the fluorescence of a dye molecule.
A complex piece of DNA that acts as a biological computer when it is inserted into cells determines whether or not the cell is a specific type of cancer cell, and if so, initiates the suicide of that cell.
Engineered bacteria that incorporate unnatural amino acids at multiple positions provide a new tool that may facilitate designing proteins to fold more predictably into molecular machinery components.
The Foldit approach to protein structure determination and protein design has proved its worth with the solution by citizen scientists in three weeks of an important protein structure that had stumped scientists working on the problem for more than a decade.
