Industrial biotechnology involves the utilization of cell factories for the production of fuels and chemicals. Traditionally, the development of highly productive microbial strains has relied on random mutagenesis and screening. The development of predictive mathematical models provides a new paradigm for the rational design of cell factories. Instead of selecting among a set of strains resulti...

Resistance to infection is largely inherited rather than acquired, and is encoded by a definable set of host genes designated the 'resistome'. Logically speaking, piecemeal disruption of the resistome gives us the best chance to define it, and the most spectacular advances in understanding innate immunity have grown from spontaneous or induced germline mutations of the resistome. Mutations indu...

Trace Recalling is a novel method for deconvoluting double traces that result from simultaneously sequencing two DNA templates. Trace Recalling identifies up to two bases at each position of such a trace. The resulting ambiguity sequence is aligned to the genome, identifying one template sequence. A second template sequence is then inferred from this alignment. This technique makes possible man...

The relationship between oligomerisation state, stability, and catalytic activity of the anthranilate phosphoribosyl transferase from Sulfolobus solfataricus (sAnPRT) was analysed by three interrelated protein engineering approaches. The extremely thermostable homodimeric sAnPRT enzyme was converted into a monomer by rational design, and its low catalytic activity at 37 C was elevated by a comb...

Objective(s):[p1]  This study highlights xylanase overproduction from Bacillus mojavensis via UV mutagenesis and optimization of the production process. Materials and Methods:Bacillus mojavenis PTCC 1723 underwent UV radiation. Mutants’ primary screening was based on the enhanced Hollow Zone Diameter/ Colony Diameter Ration (H/C ratios) of the colonies in comparison with the wild strain on Xyla...

Landmines and other explosive remnants of war pose a global humanitarian problem that claims numerous casualties long after the conflict has ended. As there are no acceptable methodologies for remote discovery such devices, current detection practices still require risky presence personnel in minefield. We have recently described bacterial sensor strains capable reporting existence 2,4-dinitrot...

We describe a postgenomic in silico approach for identifying genes that are likely to be essential and estimate their proportion in haploid genomes. With the knowledge of all sites eligible for mutagenesis and an experimentally determined partial list of nonessential genes from genome mutagenesis, a Bayesian statistical method provides reasonable predictions of essential genes with a subsaturat...