Molecular engineering articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ability to alter the genomes of living cells is key to understanding how genes influence the functions of organisms and will be critical to modify living systems for useful purposes. Here, the authors use computational design to discover Cas9 enzymes with increased activity.

    • Pascal D. Vos
    • , Giulia Rossetti
    •  & Oliver Rackham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current DNA-based data storage platforms encode information only in the nucleotide sequence. Here, the authors report a 2DDNA platform that can store data in both sequence context and backbone structure, and has improved image inpainting and enhancement via automatic discoloration detection and deep learning.

    • Chao Pan
    • , S. Kasra Tabatabaei
    •  & Olgica Milenkovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluorescent biosensors are important tools for studying cellular metabolism, but development and optimization are challenging. Koveal et al. present a high-throughput multiparameter screen for sensor performance, and used it to generate LiLac, a high-performance, quantitative lactate sensor.

    • Dorothy Koveal
    • , Paul C. Rosen
    •  & Gary Yellen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A major challenge in coronavirus vaccination and treatment is to counteract rapid viral evolution and mutations. Here the authors show that CRISPR-Cas13d can be used as a broad-spectrum antiviral to inhibit human coronaviruses, including new SARS-CoV-2 variants, combined with small molecule drugs for an enhanced antiviral effect in human primary cells.

    • Leiping Zeng
    • , Yanxia Liu
    •  & Lei S. Qi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gene circuits must resist epigenetic silencing for reliable therapeutic applications. Here the authors develop an RNA-level regulation platform using CRISPR endoRNases that is modular, scalable, and more stable than traditional transcriptional versions.

    • Breanna DiAndreth
    • , Noreen Wauford
    •  & Ron Weiss

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Artificial systems to control the transport of molecules across biomembranes can be useful for biosensing or drug delivery. Here, the authors assemble a DNA channel enabling the precisely timed, stimulus-controlled transport of functional proteins across bilayer membranes.

    • Swarup Dey
    • , Adam Dorey
    •  & Hao Yan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    tag-Targeted Protein Degrader (tTPD) systems are powerful tools for preclinical target validation. Here the authors extend the tTPD platform by developing NanoTACs that degrade NanoLuc tagged substrates and benchmark each tTPD system using an interchangeable tag reporter system.

    • Christoph Grohmann
    • , Charlene M. Magtoto
    •  & Rebecca Feltham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dynamic control over protein function is a central challenge in synthetic biology. Here the authors present an integrated computational and experimental workflow for engineering reversible protein switches; metal-chelating unnatural amino acids genetically encoded into two conformationally dynamic enzymes to yield robust switches.

    • Yasmine S. Zubi
    • , Kosuke Seki
    •  & Jared C. Lewis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Influenza virus neuraminidase (NA) is a drug target and a potential vaccine antigen. Here, the authors provide a detailed analysis of the conformational stability of NA, and show how expression and stability of recombinant NA antigens can be strengthened through structure-based design.

    • Daniel Ellis
    • , Julia Lederhofer
    •  & Masaru Kanekiyo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gq proteins are one of four major classes of G proteins; optogenetic receptors for selective and repetitive activation of Gq proteins with fast kinetics are lacking. Here the authors report UV light-dependent Gq signalling using human Neuropsin (hOPN5) and demonstrate its potential as an optogenetic tool.

    • Ahmed Wagdi
    • , Daniela Malan
    •  & Tobias Bruegmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Peptide heterodimers are prevalent in nature, which are not only functional macromolecules but molecular tools for chemical and synthetic biology. Here the authors report de novo design and directed folding of peptide heterodimers crosslinked through multiple disulfide bonds, which can be explored as chemical tools for orthogonal labeling of proteins and preparing protein hybrids.

    • Sicong Yao
    • , Adam Moyer
    •  & Chuanliu Wu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biocontainment is a key to developing safe genetically-engineered microbes (GEMs). Here the authors demonstrate genetically stable CRISPR-based kill switches that control GEMs’ viability in animal hosts, enabling their safe biomedical applications.

    • Austin G. Rottinghaus
    • , Aura Ferreiro
    •  & Tae Seok Moon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Base editing in nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is broadly useful for biomedical research, medicine, and biotechnology. Here the authors present zinc finger deaminases which catalyze targeted C-to-T base conversions without inducing unwanted indels in human cells.

    • Kayeong Lim
    • , Sung-Ik Cho
    •  & Jin-Soo Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Generic approach for rapid prototyping is essential for the progress of synthetic biology. Here the authors modify the cell-free translation system to control protein aggregation and folding and validate the approach by using single conditions for prototyping of various disulfide-constrained polypeptides.

    • Yue Wu
    • , Zhenling Cui
    •  & Sergey Mureev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Shark antibodies (Variable New Antigen Receptors, VNARs) are the smallest naturally occurring antibody fragments. Here, the authors screen a VNAR phage display library against the SARS-CoV2 receptor binding domain (RBD) and identify VNARs that neutralize the SARSCoV-2 virus and discuss their mechanisms of viral neutralization.

    • Obinna C. Ubah
    • , Eric W. Lake
    •  & Caroline J. Barelle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    CRISPR-based engineering can be used to bias sex ratios. Here the authors develop a transgenic line of Drosophila melanogaster expressing Cas9 from the Y chromosome and functionally characterize the utility of this strain for both sex selection and gene drive.

    • Stephanie Gamez
    • , Duverney Chaverra-Rodriguez
    •  & Omar S. Akbari

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors perform a large-scale, high-throughput biochemical assay to determine the compatibility of over 300,000 domain recombination variants of the inward rectifier K+ channel Kir2.1. They derive rules for designing domain insertion variants that fold and traffic to the cell surface and conclude that the insertion of domains at protein termini is evolutionary favoured.

    • Willow Coyote-Maestas
    • , David Nedrud
    •  & Daniel Schmidt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    l-lactate is an important intercellular energy currency. Here the authors report a genetically encoded biosensor eLACCO1.1 to monitor extracellular l-lactate; they use eLACCO1.1 to image extracellular l-lactate in cultured mammalian cells and brain tissue.

    • Yusuke Nasu
    • , Ciaran Murphy-Royal
    •  & Robert E. Campbell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Facilitated dissociation is a mechanism where antibody-mediated disruption of high-affinity complexes can enhance the therapeutic effects of a drug. Here the authors present a yeast display approach to select and engineer omalizumab variants that dissociate receptor-bound IgE to accelerate its inhibition of the allergic response.

    • Luke F. Pennington
    • , Pascal Gasser
    •  & Theodore S. Jardetzky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rational design of enzymes with new or improved properties is rarely straightforward, and artificial selection pressure approaches that link an improvement in the target to cell growth are an alternative. Here, the authors show that diverse enzymes sharing the ubiquitous cofactor NAD(P)+ can substitute for defective NAD+ regeneration, representing a very broadly-applicable artificial selection.

    • Lara Sellés Vidal
    • , James W. Murray
    •  & John T. Heap

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Engineering biosynthetic assembly lines is a powerful path to new natural products but is challenging with current methods. Here the authors use CRISPR-Cas9 to exchange subdomains within NRPS to alter substrate selectivity.

    • Wei Li Thong
    • , Yingxin Zhang
    •  & Jason Micklefield

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Developing more productive and sustainable crops will be essential to achieving food security in coming decades. A core process in plant evolution has been the transfer of chloroplast-encoded genes to the nuclear genome. We propose reverting this process as a new approach to improve plant disease resistance and photosynthesis in future crops.

    • Briardo Llorente
    • , María Eugenia Segretin
    •  & Nicolás E. Blanco

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Certain bovine antibodies have ultra-long long complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) that contain a knob for antigen interaction, which is connected to the antibody through a stalk. Here, the authors combine biophysical experiments and MD simulations and show that the stalk length is critical for the folding and stability of these antibodies. The authors also demonstrate that ultra-long bovine CDRs can be grafted into human antibodies, and furthermore show that de novo designed mini-domains that bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with high affinity can be integrated as a knob in ultra-long CDRs in bovine and human antibodies, which neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

    • Hristo L. Svilenov
    • , Julia Sacherl
    •  & Johannes Buchner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Traditional synthetic biology tools operate by complex re-programming of DNA, requiring significant amount of ‘nucleotide-based code’ to implement instructions that are transcribed at the protein level. Here the authors demonstrate the direct regulation of cellular phenotype at the single-protein level by creating a two-input logic gate for biological computation using ‘allosteric wiring’.

    • Yashavantha L. Vishweshwaraiah
    • , Jiaxing Chen
    •  & Nikolay V. Dokholyan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Morphogens disperse to pattern tissues and control their growth during development, allowing for the specification of multiple fates across space. Here the authors block dispersal of a morphogen Dpp (BMP2/4) and show that the requirement for Dpp dispersal is much lower than previously thought.

    • Shinya Matsuda
    • , Jonas V. Schaefer
    •  & Markus Affolter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Peptide secondary metabolites have a diverse range of functions. Here the authors present a method to design and screen a large library of modified peptides in E. coli against a target of interest.

    • Andrew M. King
    • , Daniel A. Anderson
    •  & Christopher A. Voigt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Isoflavonoids are a class of industrially important plant natural products, but their low abundance and structural complexity limits their availability. Here, the authors engineer Saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolism to become a platform for efficient production of daidzein which is core chemical scaffold for isoflavonoid biosynthesis, and show its application for production of bioactive glucosides from glucose.

    • Quanli Liu
    • , Yi Liu
    •  & Jens Nielsen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heterologous expression of recombinant proteins often results in misfolding, aggregation and degradation. Here, we show an in vivo dual-biosensor system that simultaneously assesses protein translation and protein folding, thereby enabling rapid screening of expression strains as well as mutant libraries.

    • Ariane Zutz
    • , Louise Hamborg
    •  & Alex Toftgaard Nielsen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The directed evolution of antibodies yields important tools for research and therapy. Here the authors develop a periplasmic phage-assisted continuous evolution platform for improvement of protein-protein interactions in the disulfidecompatible E. coli periplasm.

    • Mary S. Morrison
    • , Tina Wang
    •  & David R. Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genome engineering is challenging compared to plasmid DNA manipulation. Here the authors create a simple methodology called SEGA that enables genome engineering by combining DNA and bacterial cells followed by identification of recombinant clones by a change in colour when grown on agar plates.

    • Carolyn N. Bayer
    • , Maja Rennig
    •  & Morten H. H. Nørholm

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genetic code expansion strategies are limited to specific codons that can be reassigned to new amino acids. Here the authors show that quadruplet-decoding tRNAs (qtRNAs) can be rapidly discovered and evolved to decode new quadruplet codons, enabling four independent decoding events in a single protein in living cells.

    • Erika A. DeBenedictis
    • , Gavriela D. Carver
    •  & Ahmed H. Badran

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Practical implementation of genetic circuits is difficult due to low predictability and time-intensive troubleshooting. Here the authors present Cyberloop, which interfaces a computer with single cells to enable cell-in-the-loop testing and optimization of circuit designs before they are built.

    • Sant Kumar
    • , Marc Rullan
    •  & Mustafa Khammash

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Circularised nanodiscs (cNDs) are able to stabilise large lipid bilayer patches and are used for structural and functional studies. Current techniques to build cNDs have numerous steps and low yields; here the authors report a single step construction method using the SpyCatcher-SpyTag system.

    • Shanwen Zhang
    • , Qian Ren
    •  & Huan Bao

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