Biotechnology/Systems biology

Once the takeover of Monsanto by the Leverkusen-based chemistry giant Bayer is finalised, there will only be three major players left on the field of agricultural chemistry. This has caused suspicion and caution from the cartel authority. Thus, to smoothen the transition Bayer has announced to sell parts of its agricultural chemistry business. BASF has since signed an agreement to acquire significant parts of Bayer’s seed and non-selective herbicide businesses for approximately €5.9 billion.

Many animals provide ingenious inspirations for new materials and their production. Spiders, for instance, produce silk that withstands enormous forces and which has since been artificially generated in a laboratory setting. Similarly, mussels secrete byssus threads that can attach strongly to any material underwater – a long sought-after property. Velvet worms, small animals somewhere between an earthworm and a caterpillar, are equipped with an equally unique material: a sticky liquid that wards off enemies or catches prey.

Mosses are the second largest group of land plants today, and arguably the oldest. For millions of years, these plants have been producing highly complex molecules out of simple chemical building blocks, in a sustainable, efficient and cheap manner. Many of these chemical substances are used in medicine and the perfume industry today.

An international research team involving scientists from Brain AG has succeeded in extracting nearly the entire copper content from local shale deposits by applying a novel bio-leaching process. In the early extraction phase, microbes that are used for the bio-leaching process first convert insoluble ore minerals into water-soluble salts. Downstream, a bio-chemical precipitation process then recovers up to 97% of the dissolved copper.

Clariant, a specialty chemicals company based in Switzerland and with a demonstration plant in Straubing, Germany, will invest in a new full-scale commercial biorefinery for the production of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural residues using its sunliquid® technology. The new plant, with an annual production capacity of 50.000 tons, will be built in the south-western part of Romania.

Mussels produce and use one of the strongest biobased adhesives known to date, because they live in the tidal and shelf areas of the oceans and must therefore withstand strong currents and salt water. Exactly such a strong and biobased super glue would also be very useful in regenerative medicine: biocompatible adhesives could be used to treat superficial wounds, and could replace plates and screws, which are commonly used to treat bone fractures.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to education and competition, the advancement of synthetic biology, and the development of an open community and collaboration.

Microbes often live in complex biosystems. Their co-habitation is regulated by a number of chemical signals. Researchers from Jena now identified the mechanism that causes Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, roughly ten micrometer in size, to lose their flagella within minutes of coming close to Pseudomonas protegens bacteria, which are merely two micrometers in size.

Using the "DNA-origami-technique" researchers can fold single DNA strands into a three-dimensional double-stranded structure. Biophysicist Hendrik Dietz, Professor of Biomolecular Nanotechnology at TU Munich, is an expert of this field and has now developed a new way to make the tiny DNA origami structures larger by transfering viral construction principles to DNA origami technology. This enables him and his team to design and build much larger structures than before – now on the scale of viruses and cell organelles.

The number of people on the planet and thus the number of hungry mouths to feed is constantly growing and is expected to exceed 9 billion by the year 2050. Thus, there is an urgent need to improve crop yield for food output. To meet this demand, researchers lead by Manajit Hayer-Hartl at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich aim to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis and thus crop productivity by artificially engineering the plant Rubisco enzyme.