Researchers at UC San Diego in collaboration with others have constructed a new reporter RUBY that converts tyrosine to vividly red betalain, which is clearly visible to naked eyes without the need of using special equipment or chemical treatments. They demonstrated that RUBY can be used to noninvasively monitor gene expression in plants. Furthermore, they show that RUBY is an effective selection marker for transformation events.Reporters have been widely used to visualize gene expression, protein localization, and other cellular activities, but the commonly used reporters require special equipment, expensive chemicals, or invasive treatments.

These transgenic mice express an inducible version of cre recombinase mice under the direction of a Sox9 promoter. They are suitable for performing cre-recombination in pancreatic ductal cells and their progenitors.

Complex polyketides include a family of natural products that possess a wide variety of pharmacological or biological activities. Numerous polyketides and their semisynthetic derivatives have been approved for clinical use in humans or animals, including antibiotics, antifungal agents, immunosuppressants, antiparasitic agents and insecticides. All these natural products share a common mechanism of biosynthesis and are produced by a class of enzymes called polyketide synthases (PKSs). Besides their essential role in the biosynthesis of a vast diversity of natural products, the versatility of PKSs can be further emphasized as they can be redesigned and repurposed to produce novel molecules that could be used as fuels, industrial chemicals, and monomers. Most polyketide producers are slow-growing, recalcitrant to genetic manipulation, or even non-culturable.Cyanobacteria are particularly attractive for the production of natural compounds because they have minimal nutritional demands and several strains have well established genetic tools. 

Some of nature’s most complex molecules are made by cellular factories that rely on an acyl carrier protein (ACP) to shuttle growing molecules along biological assembly lines. Post-translational protein modification is important for adding functions to proteins that can be exploited for therapeutics, protein engineering, affinity design and enzyme immobilization, among other applications. Commercial techniques for attaching labels to acyl carrier protein (ACP) and other carrier proteins are currently in use.

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Inorganic nitrogen is a vital nutrient for plants. Soil nitrate provides as much as 90 percent of the nitrogen taken up by most plants and leads to a dramatic change in gene expression, which is critical to direct the productivity and survival of the plant. Consequently, nitrate is commonly provided by way of fertilizer to improve crop yield. However, many crop plants are inefficient in their ability to utilize the nitrogen. For example, corn and wheat typically only utilize 50 percent of the nitrogen applied to the soil and paddy rice may recoup as little as 30 percent. Nitrogen not used by crops may contribute to severe environmental problems, including pollution of ground water, run-off into nearby bodies of water, and release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Plants take up and assimilate nitrate in response to its availability in the soil and the demands of the plant, but with varying efficiency among species. Understanding and improving the ability of particular plant species to respond to and utilize nitrogen could therefore lead to increased crop productivity and decreased water and air pollution.

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