From gene switches to mammalian designer cells: present and future prospects

Nature has evolved a treasury of biological molecules that are logically connected to networks, enabling cells to maintain their functional integrity. Similar to electronic circuits, cells operate as information-processing systems that dynamically integrate and respond to distinct input signals. Synthetic biology aims to standardize and expand the natural toolbox of biological building blocks to engineer … Read more

Slides for Recruiting Talk for WHU-iGEM-2013

New march to 2013’s iGEM, new WHU-iGEM team. Here attached the link to my  presentation on Dec 8, 2012 at the Recruiting Talk. The slides formatted in html are deployed at my github site, and thus internet browser, like Chrome or Firefox,  supporting Html5 is highly recommended for better visualization. http://puriney.github.com/herecomesmath/#/start My presentation is based … Read more

Designing and using RNA scaffolds to assemble proteins in vivo

RNA scaffolds are synthetic noncoding RNA molecules with engineered 3D folding harnessed to spatially organize proteins in vivo. Here we provide a protocol to design, express and characterize RNA scaffolds and their cognate proteins within 1 month. The RNA scaffold designs described here are based on either monomeric or multimeric units harboring RNA aptamers as … Read more

A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated (Cas) systems provide bacteria and archaea with adaptive immunity against viruses and plasmids by using CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) to guide the silencing of invading nucleic acids. We show here that in a subset of these systems, the mature crRNA that is base-paired to trans-activating crRNA (tracrRNA) forms a … Read more