Synthetic biology articles from across Nature Portfolio

How do odorant receptors in the human nose recognize a wide variety of scent molecules? The structures of engineered versions of these receptors finally provide much-needed answers to this fundamental question.

A study uses single-molecule footprinting to measure protein occupancy at regulatory elements on individual molecules in human cells and describes how different properties of transcription factor binding contribute to gene expression.

Cytochrome P450 enzymes (P450s) and their redox partner cytochrome P450 reductase (CPR) often perform poorly in bioproduction of natural products by engineered prokaryotic microbes. Here, the authors report spatial architecture-guided P450-CPR assembly for improving the biosynthetic performance of both plant and human P450s in E. coli.

A major goal in synthetic development is to build gene regulatory circuits that control patterning. Here the authors discover that elevated cell density dampens SynNotch signaling, enabling the design of density-dependent synNotch patterning circuits where multicellular patterning outcomes are programmed by controlled cell proliferation in time and space.

Loveless, Carlson and colleagues describe peCHYRON, a DNA recorder that propagates an unending chain of insertions. Each link contains a randomizable 3-bp ‘signature’ sequence that serves to record a cellular event in the order it occurred.

Development of an in vivo system for assembly of eukaryotic nucleosomes in Escherichia coli, including the non-canonical (H3-H4)4 octasome, suggests the H3-H4 tetrasome and octasomes are likely intermediate complexes in the evolution of the eukaryotic nucleosome.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Cao (Baskin lab) discusses the development of MARS, which enables mitosis-specific recruitment of enzymes to the plasma membrane, exploiting the cell cycle’s natural regulation of PLEKHA5 phosphorylation.

How do odorant receptors in the human nose recognize a wide variety of scent molecules? The structures of engineered versions of these receptors finally provide much-needed answers to this fundamental question.

Researchers have used artificial-intelligence models to create regulatory DNA sequences that drive gene expression in specific cell types. Such synthetic sequences could be used to target gene therapies to particular cell populations.