Topic
An interdisciplinary field engineering genes, proteins, and microorganisms for novel functions, such as industrial chemicals and biosensors.
Pioneer Labs unveiled sPL.001 on September 22, the first of five planned engineered microbes for Mars. It is meant to make habitat bioplastic, and Scientific American calls the larger terraforming goal deeply speculative.
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Researchers report in Nature that 13 of 69 de novo cysteine proteases, a 19% success rate, hydrolysed the polypeptide backbone. Measured as kcat/kuncat, the rate enhancement over the uncatalysed reaction reached up to 3 x 10^7.
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Gladstone researchers report in Molecular Cell a bacterial antiviral defense, type VI retrons, that works in reverse of known systems. Shipman's lab is working to use retrons to rewrite disease-causing mutations in human cells, but the tests described here used bacteria.
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TU Darmstadt researchers have explained how their lab-built G12 riboswitch senses doxycycline and switches genes on or off in yeast and human cells. The Nature Communications paper could let a well-tolerated antibiotic act as an external control for gene expression.
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Heidelberg researchers report that mutating the DNA template at a rate of about 3% turns simple RNA droplets into cell-like structures with large vacuoles. The experiments used synthetic droplets. Medical use is the group's stated aim.
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Researchers at the University of Washington and Dartmouth rebuilt a mouse embryo's cell lineage tree across 13.5 days of development using DNA Typewriter. The full analysis rests on a single embryo, which makes the tree a demonstration of the method and one observation of mouse development.
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A team led by microbiologist Joe Peters fused two unrelated bacterial proteins into a compact tool that inserts large DNA blocks at a chosen genome site. It works in bacteria, and the team is still hunting for relatives that work in human or plant cells.
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Researchers engineered Escherichia coli with up to 15 nitroreductase gene deletions that let the cells retain nitroaromatic compounds normal strains destroy. Industry makes these chemicals with nitric acid under heat and hazard that a cell-based route avoids.
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Trolle and colleagues screened millions of synthetic metabolic pathways at once and grew hamster cells without the essential amino acid valine. Their method, shotgun genetic engineering, breaks the slow build-and-test loop that had confined such work to fast-growing microbes.
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Researchers reporting in Nature introduced Detectrons, biosensors that convert a transient RNA signal into a durable DNA barcode inside a living cell. The barcode is a permanent record of a transcript event that would otherwise leave no trace.
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Erika DeBenedictis of Pioneer Labs told more than two million X viewers her engineered Cupriavidus necator was "the first microbe for Mars." Researchers who reviewed the preprints, including NASA's Chris McKay, say it only grows in a sealed bioreactor and cannot alone revive a dead planet.
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Google DeepMind's SynthID Bio embeds a traceable mark in an AI-designed protein that a detector can find in the physical molecule, without changing how it works. The mark is meant to help DNA synthesis firms screen orders and trace which model made a sequence.
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Google DeepMind's SynthIDBio hides a watermark in AI-designed proteins that a detector reads near-perfectly without weakening how they bind. The authors call it a proof of concept, and a determined user can still scrub the mark by rerunning a design through another tool.
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A UC San Diego lab measured expression across about 500,000 initiator variants and fit a model to the result. The prevalence headline is the least useful part of it.
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A Seoul National University group rearranged a self-splicing intron so bacterial transcripts join their own ends inside the cell. Most of the extra protein came from mRNA that lasts longer, and the design worked in three hosts.
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Oak Ridge is engineering spore surfaces to bind neodymium and dysprosium in Appalachian mine water, where those metals are dilute. The pilot's main output was the assay needed to tell one engineered design from another.
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An LLM biosafety evaluator with no bench experience spent a week making fluorescent GLP-1 fusions in a community wet lab, and the account puts most of the difficulty before Day 1, in ordering DNA that works.
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A Nature Communications paper from the University of Nottingham reports that microbial colonization reprograms a root's metabolism while the root rebuilds its anatomy, and that the root's structural complexity sets how much rebuilding is available.
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Researchers report FenixS, a 17-kDa monomeric biliverdin-binding photoreceptor, and Ash1, a 6-kDa binder whose affinity for it rises more than 1,200-fold under 700-nm light in mammalian cells with no added cofactor.
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Jishen Qiu's team let Mars-like cold and vacuum do the hardening, printing cork-sized domes with the compressive strength of low-grade concrete. The imported gelatin and yeast are what the method still costs.
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Science · August 27, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers