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A modified BioBrick™ assembly method was developed with higher fidelity than current protocols. The method utilizes a PCR reaction with a standard primer set to amplify the inserted part. Background colonies a...
In a globalized word, prevention of infectious diseases is a major challenge. Rapid detection of viable virus particles in water and other environmental samples is essential to public health risk assessment, h...
CD-ELISA uses the microfluidic ranking method and centrifugal force to control the testing solution as it flows into the reaction region. The most challenging part of CD-ELISA is controlling the flow process f...
On February 15, 2008, the National Academy of Engineering unveiled their list of 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering. Building off of tremendous advancements in the past century, these challenges were selected...
The threatened plant Centella asiatica L. is traditionallyused for a number of remedies. In vitro plant propagation and enhanced metabolite production of active metabolites through biotechnological approaches has...
As engineered biological systems become more complex, it is increasingly common to express multiple operons from different plasmids and inducible expression systems within a single host cell. Optimizing such s...
Stink bugs (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) comprise a critically important insect pest complex affecting 12 major crops worldwide including cotton. In the US, stink bug damage to developing cotton bolls causes boll ...
Engineers frequently vary design parameters to optimize the behaviour of a system. However, synthetic biologists lack the tools to rapidly explore a critical design parameter, gene expression level, and have n...
Members of the synthetic biology community have discussed the significance of word selection when describing synthetic biology to the general public. In particular, many leaders proposed the word "create" was ...
Bacterial cell lysis is a widely studied mechanism that can be achieved through the intracellular expression of phage native lytic proteins. This mechanism can be exploited for programmed cell death and for ge...
FeFe-hydrogenases are the most active class of H2-producing enzymes known in nature and may have important applications in clean H2 energy production. Many potential uses are currently complicated by a crucial we...
Microfluidics holds great promise to revolutionize various areas of biological engineering, such as single cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Despite...
An investigation of the electrochemical activity of human white blood cells (WBC) for biofuel cell (BFC) applications is described. WBCs isolated from whole human blood were suspended in PBS and introduced int...
Two current technologies used in biosensor development are very promising: 1. The sol-gel process of making microporous glass at room temperature, and 2. Using a fluorescent compound that undergoes fluorescenc...
The ability to compose biological systems from smaller elements that act independently of the other upon assembly may help make the forward engineering of biological systems practical. Engineering biology in t...
The U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) recently published a document presenting "Grand Challenges for Engineering". This list was proposed by leading engineers and scientists from around the world at t...
Dendritic cells (DCs) are antigen-presenting immune cells that interact with T cells and have been widely studied for vaccine applications. To achieve this, DCs can be manipulated by lentiviral vectors (LVs) t...
BioBrick standard biological parts are designed to make biological systems easier to engineer (e.g. assemble, manipulate, and modify). There are over 5,000 parts available in the Registry of Standard Biologica...
In synthetic biology, gene regulatory circuits are often constructed by combining smaller circuit components. Connections between components are achieved by transcription factors acting on promoters. If the in...
For years, the field of drug delivery has focused on (1) controlling the release of a therapeutic and (2) targeting the therapeutic to a specific cell type. These research endeavors have concentrated mainly on...
Most of synthetic circuits developed so far have been designed by an ad hoc approach, using a small number of components (i.e. LacI, TetR) and a trial and error strategy. We are at the point where an increasin...
Published descriptions of biology protocols are often ambiguous and incomplete, making them difficult to replicate in other laboratories. However, there is increasing benefit to formalizing the descriptions of...
One problem with engineered genetic circuits in synthetic microbes is their stability over evolutionary time in the absence of selective pressure. Since design of a selective environment for maintaining functi...
Molecular rotors are a group of fluorescent molecules that form twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) states upon photoexcitation. When intramolecular twisting occurs, the molecular rotor returns to th...
Current methods for analyzing the dynamics of natural regulatory networks, and quantifying synthetic circuit function, are limited by the lack of well-characterized genetic measurement tools. Fluorescent repor...
A large amount of recombinant proteins can be synthesized in a few hours with Escherichia coli cell-free expression systems based on bacteriophage transcription. These cytoplasmic extracts are used in many applic...
Escherichia coli cell-free expression systems use bacteriophage RNA polymerases, such as T7, to synthesize large amounts of recombinant proteins. These systems are used for many applications in biotechnology, suc...
The following essay was written by Mr. Alex Hatch, a junior undergraduate student majoring in Biological Engineering at Utah State University. Mr. Hatch submitted a 1000-1200 word essay to the 5th Annual Bioethic...
Membrane proteins are an important class of proteins, playing a key role in many biological processes, and are a promising target in pharmaceutical development. However, membrane proteins are often difficult t...
A polarized light scattering technique was used to monitor the performance of a continuously operated foam fractionation process. The S11 and S12 parameters, elements of the light scattering matrix, combined toge...
Positive feedback is a common mechanism used in the regulation of many gene circuits as it can amplify the response to inducers and also generate binary outputs and hysteresis. In the context of electrical cir...
The engineering of metabolism holds tremendous promise for the production of desirable metabolites, particularly alternative fuels and other highly reduced molecules. Engineering approaches must redirect the t...
The highly reactive aldehyde acrolein is a very potent endogenous toxin with a long half-life. Acrolein is produced within cells after insult, and is a central player in slow and progressive "secondary injury"...
Standard biological parts, such as BioBricks™ parts, provide the foundation for a new engineering discipline that enables the design and construction of synthetic biological systems with a variety of applicati...
Silver has long been known to have antimicrobial activity. To incorporate this property into multiple applications, a silver-impregnated cellulose (SIC) with low cytotoxicity to human cells was developed. SIC ...
Synthetic biology brings together concepts and techniques from engineering and biology. In this field, computer-aided design (CAD) is necessary in order to bridge the gap between computational modeling and bio...
Efflux pump activity has been associated with multidrug resistance phenotypes in bacteria, compromising the effectiveness of antimicrobial therapy. The development of methods for the early detection and quanti...
Cnidocysts isolated from cnidarian organisms are attractive as a drug-delivery platform due to their fast, efficient delivery of toxins. The cnidocyst could be utilized as the means to deliver therapeutics in ...
Biological engineering will play a significant role in solving many of the world's problems in medicine, agriculture, and the environment. Recently the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) released a doc...
Advances in synthetic biology will require spatio-temporal regulation of biological processes in heterologous host cells. We develop a light-switchable, two-hybrid interaction in yeast, based upon the Arabidop...
Determination of lipophilicity as a tool for predicting pharmacokinetic molecular behavior is limited by the predictive power of available experimental models of the biomembrane. There is current interest, the...
Escherichia coli exhibits diauxic growth in sugar mixtures due to CRP-mediated catabolite repression and inducer exclusion related to phosphotransferase system enzyme activity. Replacement of the native crp gene ...
Bacterial cellulose has been used in the food industry for applications such as low-calorie desserts, salads, and fabricated foods. It has also been used in the paper manufacturing industry to enhance paper st...
The Hamiltonian Path Problem asks whether there is a route in a directed graph from a beginning node to an ending node, visiting each node exactly once. The Hamiltonian Path Problem is NP complete, achieving s...
Gradients of morphogens pattern cell fate – a phenomenon that is especially important during development. A simple model system for studying how morphogens pattern cell behavior would overcome difficulties inh...
The release of heavy metal-containing nanoparticles (NP) into the environment may be harmful to the efficacy of beneficial microbes that function in element cycling, pollutant degradation and plant growth. Nan...
Lentiviral vectors with broad tropism are one of the most promising gene delivery systems capable of efficiently delivering genes of interest into both dividing and non-dividing cells while maintaining long-te...
The following essay was written by a sophomore undergraduate student majoring in Bioengineering at the University of Maryland, Mr. Zachary Russ. Mr. Russ was one of 174 students who submitted a 1000–1200 word ...
A microfluidic channel made entirely out of polyethylene glycol (PEG), not PEG coating to silicon or polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface, was fabricated and tested for its reusability in particle immunoassays ...
Self-assembly of the amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) has been implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). As a result, synthetic molecules capable of inhibiting Aβ self-assembly could serve as therapeut...
Journal of Biological Engineering