A screening assay to test the inducing capacity of macrolides by fusing the attenuator of the inducible erm(B) gene from Streptococcus pneumoniae HM28 with the gfpmut1 gene has been designed. Fluorescence was detected under UV light around disks impregnated with inducer macrolides (erythromycin or azithromycin) but not with noninducer ketolides. Induction could be quantified by fluorometry.

The current paradigm for tuning synthetic biological systems is through re-engineering system components. Biological systems designed with the inherent ability to be tuned by external stimuli will be more versatile. We engineered Escherichia coli cells to behave as an externally tunable band-pass filter for enzyme activity and small molecules. The band's location can be positioned within a rang...

Cinematica is a minimal system for producing calibrated grayscale movies on an Apple Macintosh computer from within the Mathematica programming environment. It makes use of the ISR Video Attenuator and the Video Toolbox software library developed by Denis Pelli. By design, Cinematica provides a very low-level interface to the display routine. Display instructions take the form of a list of pair...

Display systems based on conventional computer graphics cards are capable of generating images with about 8-bit luminance resolution. However, most vision experiments require more than 12 bits of luminance resolution. Pelli and Zhang [Spatial Vis. 10 (1997) 443] described a video attenuator for generating high luminance resolution displays on a monochrome monitor, or for driving just the green ...