Synthetic Biology |

Synthetic Biology

Molecular cut and paste

A combination of cheap DNA synthesis, freely accessible databases, and our ever-expanding knowledge of protein science is conspiring to permit a revolution in creating powerful molecular tools, suggests William McEwan, Ph.D., a virologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, U.K., in this excerpt from the new book Future Science: Essays From The Cutting Edge, edited [...]

Can taking probiotics improve your mental health?

Professor Mark Lyte and associates at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center have come up with a radical concept: that you may be able to fine-tune your mental and emotional states by the right combination of probiotics! Probiotics are “good” bacteria that normally reside in your gut and are available OTC in any drug store [...]

Stealth mold genes take over human genome, jump to databases and chips!

“Earlier this year, molecular biologists announced that 20 per cent of nonhuman genome databases are contaminated with human DNA, probably from the researchers who sequenced the samples,” Technology Review‘s The Physics ArXiv blog said on Thursday. “Now, the human genome itself has become contaminated. Bill Langdon at University College London and Matthew Arno at Kings College [...]