The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 is awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, which both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules.

A team of researchers led by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Seas) has found that Escherichia coli (E. coli) may use mechanical cues to keep their shape. “This research may reveal some basic principles of bacteria growth,” said Felix Wong, a graduate student at Seas and co-first author of the paper.

At the Julius Kühn Institute, the Federal Research Institute for Cultivated Plants in Germany, a young working group is trying to specifically modify the genetic material of plants, through genome editing. In this way, they also want to investigate possible risks of this technology. LAB Worldwide visited the team for one day.

With the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance, there is a growing need for new treatment strategies against life threatening bacterial infections. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and the University of Copenhagen may have identified such an alternative treatment for bacterial meningitis, a serious infection that can lead to sepsis.

Microorganisms often assemble natural products similar to industrial assembly lines. Certain enzymes, non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) play a key role in this process. Biotechnologists at Goethe University have now been able to discover how these enzymes interact with each other. This brings them one step closer to their goal of engineering the production of such peptide natural products.

Carbohydrates are the most abundant class of biomolecules. But — their analysis is not always trivial. This article describes how electrolytic and highly automated inline eluent generation can be successfully applied to carbohydrate separations using HPAEC in combination with PAD.