0
The beginning of the week marked the move of one of my postdocs, Irena Spasić, who – based on some very nice work recorded in papers such as this and this – has secured a lectureship in Computer Science at Cardiff.
I then attended part of the programs of each of our 4 Research Committees, who were meeting near Windsor for the present grants round. It was as ever pleasing to see the high quality both of the great bulk of the applications and of the detailed discussions about the many proposals received.
Continue reading: Food and fuel for the next generation
I blog fairly regularly about the scientific opportunities opened up by the online digital availability of huge amounts of interesting stuff. One very useful set of stuff concerns the properties of small molecules, that may be of interest in general or, more particularly, because of their possible use in chemical biology/genetics (also known as chemical genomics), especially using fragment-based methods, and the possibility of mining such data using the powerful methods of chemometrics and cheminformatics. This week I learnt about the progress being made by the Chemspider operation that is a fully open access portal for small molecules and their properties, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The utility and number of users are growing apace, and the increasing availability of its features via Web Services will enable software programs to interrogate it when they need to explore chemical space automatically. The academic cheminformatics community in the UK is currently rather small, and there are consequently considerable opportunities for those who would invest in expanding it.
Continue reading: Chemical spiders, agriculture and the next generation of bioscientists
Molecular biology, as does systems biology, relies heavily on the development of novel techniques for the study of biological systems and their subsequent exploitation. Thus, X-ray crystallography (Nobel Prize) for DNA structure determination (Nobel Prize), DNA sequencing (Nobel Prize), soft-ionisation mass spectrometry (Nobel Prize) for proteomics, PCR (Nobel Prize), and the Green Fluorescent Protein (and derivatives) for cell biology (Nobel Prize) have all revolutionized modern biology. In a similar vein, the discovery and use of restriction enzymes for molecular cloning (Lasker Prize) arguably initiated modern biotechnology. A considerable amount of BBSRC support continues to be aimed at basic molecular biology and biotechnology, and just last week we announced candidate swine flu vaccines produced using novel vectors, developed last year and this for rapid molecular engineering in plants, in the laboratory of George Lomonossoff and colleagues from the John Innes Centre. In this case the time from idea to exploitation was very swift, less than 2 years, but 15 years is more common!
Continue reading: Channelling biotechnological production by molecular engineering
Industrial or white biotechnology refers to the harnessing of cells and enzymes to make products of interest (that may be the enzymes themselves), usually using microorganisms as the hosts. It is an important and growing sector for BBSRC, both in terms of basic biology and in ‘green’ application areas such as biofuels and biochemicals, since one may anticipate an increasing contribution of biotechnology to the industrial production of chemicals as we move away from petrochemical feedstocks. Creating an improving a bioprocess is a combinatorial optimisation problem at every step of the way, since even from a genomic point of view the number of possible sequences is enormous. I blogged before about this from the points of view of aptamer optimisation and of increasing expression levels of proteins in E. coli.
Continue reading: Whither industrial biotechnology?
I have blogged before about membrane transporters, but since this subject is somewhat neglected – transporters are a kind of Cinderella subject of metabolism – I shall raise some further thoughts here. The blog is partly stimulated by a very interesting paper published by Westerhoff and colleagues, who used a pHauxostat to select for strains of the (already) fast-growing yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus that could grow even faster, by up to 30%. This increase in growth rate – a doubling time of 52 min, the fastest reported for a eukaryote – was accompanied by an increase in surface area of some 40% at essentially constant volume, implying that membrane processes (such as substrate uptake) were most limiting to growth rate. (This is even true for some anaerobes.)
Continue reading: Membrane transporters – the ‘gatekeepers’ of the cell and their importance in ‘white biotechnology’
Back to top