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Volume 29 Issue 4, April 2011

Rod-shaped Escherichia coli bacteria against a background of metabolic pathways. Liao and colleagues introduce pathways into bacteria to convert amino acids into alcohol biofuels (p 346). Credit: Marina Corral; based on false-colored scanning electron micrograph by David Scharf (Getty Images).

Volume 29 Issue 4

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Editorial

  • The launch of Nature Biotechnology's Trade Secrets blog reflects the growing importance of biotech in emerging markets.

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News

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Data Page

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News Feature

  • With the economy sputtering toward recovery, federal outlays shriveling and the political scene in upheaval, the US biotech policy picture is more than a little blurred. Jeffrey L. Fox reports.

    • Jeffrey L. Fox
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Patents

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News & Views

  • A natural system for ferrying RNA between cells is used to transport siRNA to the mouse brain.

    • Jasper G van den Boorn
    • Martin Schlee
    • Gunther Hartmann
    News & Views

  • Rerouting nitrogen flux in bacteria allows renewable production of biofuels from proteins.

    • Jonathan R Mielenz
    News & Views

  • An optical spectroscopy method can measure the affinities of ligands to membrane receptors that are embedded in their native membranes.

    • Charles A Lunn
    News & Views
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Research Highlights

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Profile

  • John Storey provides his take on the importance of new statistical methods for high-throughput sequencing.

    • H. Craig Mak
    Profile
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Perspective

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Letter

  • Delivery of therapeutic siRNA to specific tissues is a major challenge. Alvarez-Erviti et al. show that exosomes—small vesicles that are naturally secreted by many animal cells—can be engineered to transport siRNA specifically to the brain in mice.

    • Lydia Alvarez-Erviti
    • Yiqi Seow
    • Matthew J A Wood
    Letter

  • Proteins have been largely unexplored as feedstocks for synthesizing fuels and chemicals in microbes, in part because their degradation is not thermodynamically favored in the cell. Huo et al. overcome this by engineering nitrogen flux in E. coli, creating microbes that generate biofuels when grown in protein-rich medium.

    • Yi-Xin Huo
    • Kwang Myung Cho
    • James C Liao
    Letter

  • The inadvertent cutting of nerves is a common adverse event during surgery. To ease visual identification of nerve fibers, Whitney et al. use phage display to develop a peptide that specifically stains peripheral nerves in living mice and in human tissue samples.

    • Michael A Whitney
    • Jessica L Crisp
    • Quyen T Nguyen
    Letter

  • Methods to measure affinities of membrane proteins and soluble ligands are cumbersome and often rely on truncations or other modifications of the membrane protein or ligand. Baksh et al. show that backscattering interferometry is a sensitive and accurate technology for the label-free quantification of ligand–membrane receptor interactions.

    • Michael M Baksh
    • Amanda K Kussrow
    • Darryl J Bornhop
    Letter
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