4 Awesome Discoveries You Probably Didn’t Hear About this Week – Episode 9

A new target for antibiotics, a dodecahedron device for the deep sea, electronic stickers to scale up the Internet of Things, and self-fertilizing bacteria with rhythm. It's your weekly briefing on the latest discoveries you might not hear about anywhere else, all with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Who did the research?
Studying aliens of the deep
Wyss Institute at Harvard University
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Bacterial armor could be a new target for antibiotics
Stanford University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of California, San Francisco

Electronic stickers to streamline large-scale 'Internet of Things'
Purdue University
University of Virginia

Researchers engineer bacteria that create fertilizer out of thin air
Washington University in St. Louis

[timothybucky]

comprehensive analysis of bacterial surface proteins. 2-DE remains a method of choice because of its visualisation power, although recent advances in shotgun proteomics are overcoming many of the traditional difficulties associated with the analysis of hydrophobic integral membrane proteins. With the discovery of novel labels such as ICAT™, iTRAQ™ and SILAC, the coming years should welcome an influx of data regarding the role of bacterial membrane proteins during growth in vivo, during pathogenic processes and generally following altered biological conditions.

surfaceomics approach relying on cell surface shaving and mass spectrometry [56••]. This excellent manuscript [56••] is the first to successfully describe this approach, without major contamination from cytoplasmic proteins. The authors determined that ‘shaving’ of surface-exposed proteins from group A streptococci resulted in the identification of many protective antigens already described in the literature. Furthermore, and most excitingly, expression of proteins in E. coli and testing of these proteins protective capability identified one new antigen. Thus, the method has great potential in generating new vaccine antigens.

[hendelar]

Quaint ain't. Interesting info regardless. Mostly.