Current Chemical Biology - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2012

Concerns about diminishing fossil fuel reserves along with the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are driving society towards the search for new renewable sources of energy. In this sense, biomass has the potential to significantly displace petroleum in the production of fuels and chemicals. Among the number of routes available today for the conversion of biomass into fuels and chemicals, new microbial technolo Read More

Using fuels and chemicals derived from fossil sources underpins much of our everyday life and industrialized economy. However, obtaining carbon from oil and gas presents a number of environmental, economic, and political challenges. One solution to these challenges is to derive fuels and chemicals from renewable sources of carbon such as biomass or atmospheric carbon dioxide, thereby closing the carbon loop and movi Read More

With increasing demand of energy, depletion of global fossil fuel reserves, and unsustainable emission rates of greenhouse gases, there is considerable impetus for the development of renewable fuel sources. Fatty acid derived biofuels, being energy-dense and compatible with existing infrastructure, represent a promising supplement to petroleum-based fuels. Earlier work has led to extensive genetic and biochemical c Read More

The unnerving price of petroleum will push a major change from a petroleum based economy to a natural feedstock based economy. Production of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) using industrial and agriculture by-products can allow the use of low-cost feedstock to produce materials with specific monomer composition and therefore, with the appropriate physicochemical properties to be used in a broad range of applicatio Read More

Cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria with conversion capability to utilize solar energy and carbon dioxide and genetic engineering capacity to be easily modified to build non-native and improve native biosynthetic pathways, have displayed huge potential for biotechnology applications for direct production of biofuels by using solar energy as energy source and carbon dioxide as carbon source. Here research progress on m Read More

Biofuels synthesized from renewable resources are of increasing interest because of global energy and environmental problems. Compared to the traditional biofuel, ethanol, higher alcohols such as isobutanol and 1-butanol offer advantages such as higher energy density, lower hygroscopicity, lower vapor pressure, and compatibility with existing transportation infrastructure. Some Clostridia species are known to naturally produ Read More

The optimization of fructooligosaccharides (FOS) synthesis by immobilized fructosyltransferase from Rhodotorula sp. LEB-V10 was carried out on the basis of the experimental factorial design methodology, consisting of two consecutives (24-1) Fractional Factorial Design (FFD) for the following variable factors: temperature, pH, initial sucrose concentration and immobilized enzyme activity. The main target responses were FOS yi Read More

MicroRNAs (miRNAs), which are highly conserved, non-coding endogenous RNA and nearly ∼22 nucleotides (nt) in length, have been widely reported to play the crucial roles in a number of pathological processes, most notably cancer. Hitherto, accumulating evidence has demonstrated that miRNAs are involved in mediating several cancer-related pathways linked to Programmed cell death (PCD), indicating that miRNAs Read More

Recent reports show that ordered mesoporous materials (OMM) are efficient as supports for the immobilization of enzymes. The advantageous textural, morphological and structural properties, the easy control of their parameters, and the interesting possibility of functionalizing the surface with a variety of organic groups, make them very promising supports for this application. We present in this mini-review a survey of our Read More

There are number of methods used for detection of antioxidant activities. We have developed a new method using a compound (resazurin) which undergoes a visible colour shift by chemical or physical interaction with ascorbate and other antioxidant compounds. This novel method was developed to measure the antioxidant activity using the resazurin dye in microtitre- plate. The experiment protocol, which is rapid and in Read More

Wax esters have a variety of biotechnological usage in cosmetic and pharmaceutical products. Synthesized wax esters can be an alternative to sperm whale being rare. The ability of a non-commercial immobilized lipase from Rhizopus oryzae to catalyze the synthesis of wax esters was investigated in organic media. Wax esters were obtained by esterification of myristic, palmitic, stearic or oleic acids with cetyl alcohol. R Read More

Copper has two key properties that make it an active ingredient in the medical devices currently being developed. First, copper is an essential trace element needed by humans, which plays a key role in many physiological processes in different tissues. For example, copper has been shown to be involved in angiogenesis and in wound healing. Second, copper has very potent antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and acaricidal propert Read More