Biological techniques articles within Nature Chemistry

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  • Article |

    Anti-proliferative compounds that display enhanced toxicity in a low-oxygen (hypoxic) environment may be used to eradicate aggressive and therapy-resistant cancer cells. Now, a promising lead structure has been identified in the BE-43547-class of depsipeptide natural products.

    • Nikolaj L. Villadsen
    • , Kristian M. Jacobsen
    •  & Thomas B. Poulsen

  • Article |

    Dynamic nonlinear biochemical circuits are functionally rich; however, this nonlinear nature also makes programming them delicate and painstaking. Now a droplet microfluidic platform reveals precisely the bifurcations of two canonical systems: a bistable switch and a predator–prey oscillator, exposing optimal regions and mechanistic insights that inform the design of these systems.

    • A. J. Genot
    • , A. Baccouche
    •  & Y. Rondelez

  • News & Views |

    Directed evolution is a powerful tool for the development of improved enzyme catalysts. Now, a method that enables an enzyme, its encoding DNA and a fluorescent reaction product to be encapsulated in a gel bead enables the application of directed evolution in an ultra-high-throughput format.

    • Eugene J. H. Wee
    •  & Matt Trau

  • News & Views |

    Fluorescent labels can now be attached to a specific protein on the surface of live cells using a two-step method that reacts a norbornene — introduced using genetic encoding — with a variety of dyes.

    • Dante W. Romanini
    •  & Virginia W. Cornish

  • Article |

    High-fidelity pairing of nucleic acid polymers is important in the development of sensors and for the application of DNA nanotechnology. Here, a set of hybridization probes is described that discriminates single-base changes with high specificity. The probes function robustly across many different temperatures, salinities and nucleic acid concentrations.

    • David Yu Zhang
    • , Sherry Xi Chen
    •  & Peng Yin

  • Article |

    DNA has been used as a building block to make a wide variety of molecular architectures, but it remains difficult to make functional structures from this particular construction material. Now, a strategy for the assembly of hybrid RNA–DNA nanostructures has been described, which offers the possibility of combining the programmability of DNA with the rich functionality of RNA.

    • Seung Hyeon Ko
    • , Min Su
    •  & Chengde Mao

  • Article |

    An optical molecular imaging dye is described that is based on an interlocked squaraine rotaxane peroxide. These fluorescent and chemiluminescent dye molecules can be stored indefinitely at low temperature, but on warming to body temperature they undergo a unimolecular reaction, emitting near-infrared light that can pass through a living mouse.

    • Jeffrey M. Baumes
    • , Jeremiah J. Gassensmith
    •  & Bradley D. Smith

  • Article |

    A small-molecule-affinity tag has been designed to mediate the selective isolation of G-quadruplex nucleic acids in a structure-dependant manner. This concept has been applied to the pull-down of G-quadruplex-containing fragments from human cells, and the methodology holds promise for the elucidation of their putative biological functions.

    • Sebastian Müller
    • , Sunita Kumari
    •  & Shankar Balasubramanian

  • News & Views |

    A series of scanning probe microscopy experiments combined with density functional theory calculations have now been used to unambiguously determine the structure of a marine natural product. Can this method become generally useful for the determination of the structure of natural products?

    • John W. Blunt

  • Research Highlights |

    A vanadium-containing nitrogenase enzyme can reduce carbon monoxide to ethane and propane.

    • Neil Withers

  • News & Views |

    The cell's dynamic skeleton, a tightly regulated network of protein fibres, continues to provide inspiration for the design of synthetic nanostructures. Genetic engineering has now been used to encode non-biological functionality within these structures.

    • Rein V. Ulijn
    •  & Pier-Francesco Caponi

  • Research Highlights |

    The incorporation of a small, photochemically controllable diazoketone moiety in fluorescent rhodamine dyes shows great promise in biological imaging.

    • Anne Pichon

  • Research Highlights |

    A promising material for splitting water relies on the favourable arrangement of photosensitive and catalytic components.

    • Gavin Armstrong

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