An alkyne-tagged ethanolamine analog (AlkEA) enables bioorthogonal, metabolic labeling of endogenous phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) and its protein modifications. AlkEA is incorporated into PE via the...

DNA glycosylases, typically used for DNA repair, can also protect bacteria against phages that would otherwise evade host immunity by incorporating modified bases into their genomes.

A nanopore-based ‘chop and measure’ method sequences peptides at single-amino-acid resolution by using enzymatic digestion to progressively shorten the N terminus one residue at a time,...

Black et al. identify the L. pneumophila effector SidL as an adenylyltransferase that targets host glycolysis. SidL covalently modifies the glycolytic intermediate 3-phosphoglycerate (3PG) with AMP, g...

There is limited understanding of nickel-catalysed chemistry in nature. Now a bioinformatic pipeline reveals a structurally distinct family of nickel pincer nucleotide-dependent enzymes. Nickel pincer...

Ribosomes are capable of incorporating a wide array of natural and unnatural monomers into growing polymer chains, but can be stalled by monomers with constrained or non-natural backbones. Here we eva...

Historically, many compelling therapeutic targets have been accessible only by injectable biologic drugs. Macrocyclic peptides, such as the proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 inhibitor enli...

Because all known living organisms are made from at least 20 canonical amino acids, the feasibility of life using a more simplified alphabet remains unclear. In this work, we leveraged computational d...

An immunity-like system functions as a lysis control hub to promote gene transfer agent particle release from host bacterial cells, suggesting that bacterial immune systems may be co-opted to promote ...

Diversity-generating retroelements are engineered for directed evolution in E.coli.

Nature Chemical Biology - Endosomal Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are central to the innate immune response but their overactivation can cause systemic inflammation and disease. Now, new small...

Two research teams mined genomic data from bacteria to create databases containing thousands of antiviral defence proteins that could inspire powerful biotechnologies.

Antiphage defense systems protect bacteria from viral infection and have inspired important biotechnologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 while also revealing the evolutionary roots of eukaryotic innate immunit...

Arbitrium phages belonging to different species and genera can influence each other’s infection dynamics by secreting chemically similar, non-cognate signal peptides. These findings indicate that arbitrium-based communication is not as specific as previously thought.

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans facilitate the assembly of clusters of glycoRNAs and cell surface RNA-binding proteins, which negatively modulate VEGF-A signalling and angiogenesis.

That feat has synthetic biologists excited

A post-translational backbone extension acyl rearrangement (BEAR) reaction has now been developed that converts a ribosomal protein product into a new product containing a β-peptide, γ-peptide or δ-pe...

SNAP-tag is a widespread tool for labeling protein for bioimaging. Now, Kühn et al. report SNAP-tag2 with increased labeling kinetics and brightness, which translates into a better performance in live...

The ribosomal incorporation of backbone-modified amino acid analogs into peptides and proteins enables the programmed synthesis of sequence-defined biopolymers with tunable properties. However, the su...