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Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering

Development Of In Vivo Systems For Detecting And Studying Ribosome Inhibition By Small Molecules, Shijie Huang Nov 2016

Development Of In Vivo Systems For Detecting And Studying Ribosome Inhibition By Small Molecules, Shijie Huang

Chemistry and Chemical Biology ETDs

The ribosome is the quintessential antibacterial drug target, with many structurally and mechanistically distinct classes of antibacterial agents acting by inhibiting ribosome function. Detecting and quantifying ribosome inhibition by small molecules and investigating their binding modes and mechanisms of action are critical to antibacterial drug discovery and development efforts. To develop a ribosome inhibition assay that is operationally simple, yet provides direct information on the drug target and the mechanism of action, we have developed engineered E. coli strains harboring an orthogonal ribosome controlled green fluorescent protein reporter that produce fluorescent signal when the O-ribosome is inhibited. As a proof …


A Roadmap To Safe And Reliable Engineered Biological Nano-Communication Networks, Justin W. Firestone Apr 2016

A Roadmap To Safe And Reliable Engineered Biological Nano-Communication Networks, Justin W. Firestone

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Synthetic biology has the potential to benefit society with novel applications that can improve soil quality, produce biofuels, grow customized biological tissue, and perform intelligent drug delivery, among many other possibilities. Engineers are creating techniques to program living cells, inserting new logic, and leveraging cell-to-cell communication, which result in changes to a cell's core functionality. Using these techniques, we can now create synthetic biological organisms (SBOs) with entirely new (potentially unseen) behaviors, which, similar to silicon devices, can sense, actuate, perform computation, and interconnect with other networks at the nanoscale level. SBOs are programmable evolving entities, and can be likened …