New proteins enable scientists to control cell activities

Sailan Shui, a doctoral assistant at EPFL's Laboratory of Protein Design and Immunoengineering, enjoys playing with proteins, activating and deactivating them as she wishes, as if light switches that can be turned on and ...

Possible new antivirals against COVID-19, herpes

In addition to antibodies and white blood cells, the immune system deploys peptides to fight viruses and other pathogens. Synthetic peptides could reinforce this defense but don't last long in the body, so researchers are ...

Synthetic biology circuits can respond within seconds

Synthetic biology offers a way to engineer cells to perform novel functions, such as glowing with fluorescent light when they detect a certain chemical. Usually, this is done by altering cells so they express genes that can ...

Move over CRISPR, the retrons are coming

While the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has become the poster child for innovation in synthetic biology, it has some major limitations. CRISPR-Cas9 can be programmed to find and cut specific pieces of DNA, but editing the ...

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