Recent Patents on Biotechnology - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2010

Plant transformation technology plays an ever-increasing role in improving crop plant traits and addressing research questions. In recent years, a number of important patents on plant transgenic technologies have been published. These patents represent significant new progresses, many representing novel approaches in the field of plant transgenic technology. This review highlights selected as well as the most significant Read More

Vaccinium is a genus of shrubs several of which, including cranberry, lingonberry, and blueberry, produce edible fruit. Consumption of the fruit of these plants and juices pressed from it has long been known to have healthful effects. A number of functional compounds have been extracted from the fruits and seeds of these plants. Anthocyanidins and related compounds have been reported to possess antimicrobial, antioxid Read More

As single cell systems, protoplasts have been used in physiological, biochemical and molecular studies aiming towards the investigation, improvement or modification of plants. In grapevine, protoplasts have been isolated from several source tissues but not from grape berry, a major challenge given the uniqueness of grape fruit for human diet and wine production. Also, as the ripe grape berry has long been considere Read More

Multifunctional nanoprobes, such as nanocrystals, nanoshells, and luminescent nanomaterials, have been developed for imaging biological processes, such as cell signaling, neuroimaging, protein conformation probing, DNA conformation probing, gene transcription, virus infection and replication in cells, protein dynamics, tumor diagnosis, and therapy evaluation. With the application of nanotechnology for CNS-active ag Read More

Recent advances in agricultural biotechnology have enabled the field of plant biology to move forward in great leaps and bounds. In particular, recent breakthroughs in molecular biology, plant genomics and crop science have brought about a paradigm shift of thought regarding the manner by which plants can be utilized both in agriculture and in medicine. Besides the more well known improvements in agronomic traits of cr Read More

The heterologous protein expression system of Pichia pastoris is now widely used for expression of many human proteins, because the efficiently expressed proteins will be correctly folded in Pichia pastoris cells and also efficiently secreted from the cells. Recombinant human serum albumin (rHSA) is efficiently secreted from Pichia pastoris. Nowadays, the expression of rHSA exceeds 10g in 1 L fermentor culture broth, and th Read More

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