YouTube video by Fungal-Worm Lab IMB Academia Sinica

Genomes from metagenomes have revolutionised our understanding of microbial diversity, ecology, and evolution, propelling advances in basic science, biomedicine, and biotechnology. Assembly algorithms...

Enhancing seed oil content significantly benefits both human welfare and environmental sustainability. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas) and artificial intelligence (AI) are transformative tools for crop trait improvement. A recent study by Wang and colleagues reported that AlphaFold-guided CRISPR genome editing of SWEET10 boosts oil contents, highlighting a breakthrough in precision crop engineering.

Ginkgo’s cell free protein synthesis (CFPS) kit is an E. coli transcription/translation system optimized to produce proteins from a T7 RNA Polymerase promoter.  Reactions consist of a bacterial cell l...

Main conclusion Based on expression, functional, and metabolomic analyses in the seeds of the single-receptor mutants, each receptor has a specific function during seed development. Their redundant ro...

Plants produce a plethora of specialised metabolites that often play important roles in their defence against pathogenic microbes or herbivorous insects. Exposure of leaf colonising microbes to these ...

Biological nitrogen fixation, catalyzed by nitrogenase, can convert atmospheric N₂ into NH₃ for plant growth. Legumes form symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but non-legumes rely on excessive nitrogen fertilizers. Efforts to engineer nitrogenase in non-legumes face major challenges, including oxygen sensitivity, metal cluster assembly complexity, and high energy demands. Nonetheless, advances in synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design – shown by partial nitrogenase reconstitution in Escherichia coli and yeast – offer promising solutions. Engineering nitrogenase in yeast mitochondria under low-oxygen conditions also helps circumvent oxygen constraints. Fully overcoming energy costs and feedback loops responsive to nitrogen levels could yield nitrogen-fixing crops, transforming sustainable agriculture and ensuring global food security. Such breakthroughs would reduce fertilizer dependence, cut pollution, and stabilize yields in diverse farming systems.

Abstract. Correlation networks are commonly used to explore microbiome data. In these networks, nodes are taxa and edges represent correlations between the

Root exudates regulate methane emissions in rice paddies, with fumarate and ethanol discovered as two main compounds regulating methane emissions. Employing this finding for breeding resulted in novel...

Strigolactones (SLs) are methylbutenolide molecules derived from β-carotene through an intermediate carlactonoic acid (CLA). Canonical SLs act as signals to microbes and plants, whereas noncanonical S...

Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...