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Regulatory mechanisms coordinating amino acid and glucose catabolism in E. coli
Microbes need to coordinate utilization of nutrients but the triggering signals remain unclear. A recent "Nat Comm" paper by the Zampieri & Sauer groups (IMSB) developed a computational approach to identify the intracellular signals that prioritize amino acid over glucose degradation from dynamic exo-metabolome data.
Automating the path from genomes to predicted chemical structures
A new "Nature Chemical Biology" paper by the Piel and Steinbeck (Cambridge) groups introduces TransATor, a web application that permits the structural prediction of bioactive natural products generated by bacterial trans-AT polyketide synthases, some of the most complex biosynthetic enzymes known.
Whole-genome miRNA activity at single cell-type resolution
How microRNA activity is spatially coordinated within and across the various cell types of an intact organ had not been elucidated in any species to date. Publishing in the EMBO Journal, the Voinnet team has now addressed this challenging issue in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana