Cell-free lysates are a major platform for in vitro protein production but batch-to-batch variation makes production difficult to predict. A research team from the Micalis institute, in collaboration with the Chemogenomic and Biological Screening Core Facility of the Institut Pasteur,…
Metabolic engineering aims to produce chemicals of interest from living organisms, to advance toward greener chemistry. Despite efforts, the research and development process is still long and costly, and efficient computational design tools are required to explore the chemical biosynthetic…
While machine learning methods are used in many areas, including human health, interfacing these methods with the living world has been little explored at the molecular level. We have just taken a first step in this direction by engineering a…
Synthetic biology is the field of engineering biology inspired by engineering in computation, standardization, and construction to develop new devices composed of biological parts. Cell-free systems are emerging as abiotic platforms for high-throughput characterization and prototyping of natural and synthetic…
RetroRules is a database of reaction rules for metabolic engineering (https://retrorules.org). Reaction rules are generic descriptions of chemical reactions that can be used in retrosynthesis workflows in order to enumerate all possible biosynthetic routes connecting a target molecule to its…
Synthetic biology applied to industrial biotechnology is transforming the way we produce chemicals. However, despite advances in the scale and scope of metabolic engineering, the bioproduction process still remains costly. In order to expand the chemical repertoire for the production…
Genetically-encoded biosensors offer a wide range of opportunities to develop advanced synthetic biology applications. Circuits with the ability of detecting and quantifying intracellular amounts of a compound of interest are central to whole-cell biosensors design for medical and environmental applications,…
Detection of chemical signals is critical for cells in nature as well as in synthetic biology, where they serve as inputs for designer circuits. Important progress has been made in the design of signal processing circuits triggering complex biological behaviors,…
Synthetic biology is today harnessing the design of novel and greener biosynthesis routes for the production of added-value chemicals and natural products. The design of novel pathways often requires a detailed selection of enzyme sequences to import into the chassis…
Production of value-added chemicals in microorganisms is regarded as a viable alternative to chemical synthesis. In the past decade, several engineered pathways producing such chemicals, including plant secondary metabolites in microorganisms have been reported; upscaling their production yields, however, was…