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  • Prokaryotic CRISPR–Cas systems are counteracted by phage-encoded anti-CRISPR elements, and how they protect themselves remains enigmatic. A study shows that CRISPR-repressed toxins defend CRISPR–Cas against anti-CRISPR proteins or RNAs by inducing abortive infection.

    • Yi Zhang
    • Yue Feng
    News & Views
  • Metabolic engineering often suffers from competition between heterologous enzymes and native metabolism. Here the authors improve on a strategy of compartmentalizing metabolic pathways to the peroxisome by increasing peroxisome functional capacity, aided by machine learning, to produce geraniol.

    • Jordan J. Baker
    • Jie Shi
    • John E. Dueber
    Article
  • High levels of superoxide (O2) are known to regulate plant stem cell behavior, but its downstream effectors remain unclear. O2 was found to directly promote DNA demethylase ROS1 activity to maintain the stemness of plant shoot apical meristem.

    • Xuan Du
    • Jiamu Du
    News & Views
  • Protein kinase C (PKC) enzymes are critical signaling molecules but their regulation at emerging signaling hubs is unclear. Here Su et al. develop a sensitive fluorescent biosensor, ExRai-CKAR2, and reveal distinct spatiotemporal regulation of different PKC isoforms in two-dimensional and three-dimensional models.

    • Qi Su
    • Jing Zhang
    • Jin Zhang
    Article
  • Biofouling causes a huge economic loss to our society. This Perspective examines the biofouling process from microfouling to macrofouling, discusses a spectrum of chemical signals that induce and inhibit biofouling and argues for potential management by targeting the signaling responsible for biofilm dispersion or biofouling inhibition.

    • Xiaobo Liu
    • Ling Zou
    • Ji-Dong Gu
    Perspective
  • This Perspective discusses how macromolecular condensation can regulate the electrochemistry to affect biological function in living cells and provides a framework to study the electrochemical functions of biomolecular condensates.

    • Yifan Dai
    • Zhen-Gang Wang
    • Richard N. Zare
    Perspective
  • The integration of a new orthogonal redox cofactor opens opportunities for controlling reaction equilibria. Because it does not interfere with cellular redox homeostasis, this approach enables the precise tuning of metabolic pathways and the optimization of microbial bioproduction, independently of canonical redox balancing.

    • Lena M. Hümmler
    • Steffen N. Lindner
    News & Views
  • An automation tool has been designed that enables partitioning of an algorithm into subcircuits split across cells for biological computing. The tool was applied to a hashing algorithm requiring 110 logic gates across 66 cells.

    • Jai P. Padmakumar
    • Jessica J. Sun
    • Christopher A. Voigt
    Article
  • The use of an adenine base editor enables identification of functional serine, threonine and tyrosine residues that impact cell fitness on a genome-wide scale with possible involvement in phosphorylation, structural maintenance and cancer biology.

    • Yizhou Li
    • Tao Xu
    • Wensheng Wei
    Article
  • Research in the early days of chemical biology was mostly limited to the application of chemical tools to model cell lines grown in incubators. Now, discoveries are being made in more physiologically relevant systems, from tissues to organisms, using precisely targeted molecules. The 2023 Chemical Biology & Physiology meeting (in Portland, Oregon) discussed the latest advances in the field, with research from around the globe demonstrating that the transition to making discoveries at the chemical biology–physiology interface is happening now.

    • Kimberly E. Beatty
    • Carsten Schultz
    Meeting Report
  • Orally bioavailable, high molecular weight macrocyclic peptides that inhibit difficult-to-drug protein–protein interactions are of high therapeutic value, and rules for their design were proposed recently. Here, we emphasize the danger of rules that provide a false impression of the lipophilicity required of a clinical candidate.

    • Vasanthanathan Poongavanam
    • Duc Duy Vo
    • Jan Kihlberg
    Comment
  • Li, Cheng, Yu and colleagues have discovered a Cas13j family, including the compact and highly efficient LepCas13j (529 aa) and ChiCas13j (424 aa), with promising applications in RNA editing in vivo.

    • Guo Li
    • Yaxian Cheng
    • Yuan Yao
    Article
    • Yiyun Song
    Research Highlight