Engineers create custom tuning knobs to turn off any gene
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - 10:05
in Biology & Nature
Factory managers can improve productivity by telling workers to speed up, slow down, or stop doing tangential tasks while assembling widgets. Unfortunately for synthetic biologists attempting to produce pharmaceuticals, microbes don't respond to simple spoken directions like human personnel. Now, however, a new advance by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers allows scientists fine-tune biological functions in their bacterial employees.