News & Views in 2001

Tobacco has been engineered with a bacterial nitroreductase that facilitates degradation of trinitrotoluene.

DNA chemistry may provide a solution to the deceptively difficult problem of enhancing DNA nuclear transport in nonviral vectors.

Molecular tags made of small metal rods may enable parallel and quantitative single-tube assays.

Microbial genomics is producing a plethora of candidate targets for developing new classes of antimicrobial agent.

Two studies demonstrate the efficient generation of brain cells from human ES cells.

A polymer scaffold that delivers two angiogenic factors with distinct kinetics shows promise for engineering mature blood vessels.

Changes in protein conformation have been exploited to create chemoresponsive bioelectronic sensors.

Engineering the regulatory pathways of a replicating oncolytic adenovirus enhances selective destruction of tumor cells.

Yeast has been engineered so that the binding of small-molecule ligands to a target protein can be simply detected by changes in growth.

A cell-permeable Cre recombinase provides an alternative approach for genetically manipulating cells in culture and mice.

Cell lines that differ by a single genetic change show promise in drug screens to identify compounds with gene-selective properties.

Two reports shed light on the molecular basis of resistance to Bt toxins.

Nanowire sensors decorated with specific capture molecules can detect minute quantities of biological and chemical species.

A rapid method for exploring gene function uses alphavirus expression cloning.

The tomato has been engineered to express in its plastids high levels of a recombinant protein.

Microarrays of purified proteins, representing most of the yeast genome, prove useful for studying protein function on a genome-wide scale.

Biosensors based on a quartz crystal microbalance show promise for sensitive and rapid viral detection.

Transgenic plants expressing an enzyme that degrades microbial signaling molecules show promise in controlling damage caused by bacterial infections.

In vitro protein synthesis using a mixture of purified components now offers the possibility of efficient production of labile products and more detailed study of the translation process.

Peptides derived from tiny bacterial viruses may offer an alternative strategy for combating bacterial infections.