Synthetic genomics, though a relatively nascent field, is generating a lot of excitement in the scientific community, especially with the advent of unnatural nucleic acid polymers. Threose nucleic acid (TNA) is one such unnatural nucleic acid polymer that is particularly promising because of its high resistance to nuclease degradation, making it much...

Studying single cells is difficult due to the laborious and costly cell isolation procedures which restrict throughput and impede the analysis of large numbers of cells or multiple samples in a single experiment. ASU researchers previously developed a method which used the cell’s membrane as a container for different reactions. One such reaction...

Protein misfolding plays a role in degenerative diseases, cancer evolution, synthetic biology, bioproducts, and more. Despite its importance in all of these fields, researchers often struggle to understand even the basic mechanisms of protein misfolding. For example, there is no tool to determine how much misfolding is happening inside of any given...

Cells have developed various means for transporting molecules across membranes as well as cellular compartments separated by membranes. Channels and pores can be formed with different protein assemblies to enable the regulated passage of molecules in and out of cells, which has led to them being exploited as molecular sensors for characterizing biomolecules...

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have revolutionized genomics research because they enable faster, cheaper and accurate decoding of nucleotide sequences. This has resulted in breakthroughs in diagnostics, disease risk assessment, personalized medicines, screening and more. However, despite all the NGS-related advancements that have been...

DNA and RNA nanostructures, e.g., DNA Origami, have great potential in biological applications, including extracellular matrix scaffolds and delivery vehicles for drugs and gene therapies. While folding DNA origami under physiological conditions is plausible, significant challenges and limitations remain. For example, isothermal annealing of DNA origami...

Many cancers have recurrent chromosomal translocations leading to the fusion of two genes. Often, said cancers are aggressive, have a poor prognosis with metastasis or recurrence, and do not have effective and targeted treatment. The challenge of many fusion-positive cancers is the lack of established targets downstream of the gene fusion despite years...

The US Government's pursuit of the "Thousand Dollar Genome" and the "X Prize" goal of even lower cost DNA sequencing are striking examples of the importance being assigned to advances in methods for the DNA sequencing of the human genome. The first technology that finally allows for truly routine genome sequencing will open a new...

DNA mutations are the basis of all heritable biological variation. Some variation gives rise to beneficial traits, many are neutral or nearly neutral, and some result in deleterious phenotypes. While it is commonly believed that DNA mutations affect evolutionary phenotypic trajectories over millions of years, scientific advances have shown that this...

Mutation accumulation (MA) experiments are widely used in evolutionary biology for studying the effects, rates and properties of new spontaneous mutations. Despite this, they are laborious to execute, typically taking months to years to a acquire sufficient mutations to measure mutation rates and spectra. Further, typical tools such as agar plates and...