Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are receiving increased attention for use as cell factories for the production of metabolites with wide use by the food and pharmaceutical industries. The availability of efficient tools for genetic modification of LAB during the past…

Systemics, a revolutionary paradigm shift in scientific thinking, with applications in systems biology, and synthetic biology, have led to the idea of using silicon computers and their engineering principles as a blueprint for the engineering of a similar machine made…

Chemical compounds are usually represented as graph structured data in computers. In this review article, we overview several graph classes relevant to chemical compounds and the computational complexities of several fundamental problems for these graph classes. In particular, we consider…

Translation or protein synthesis consists of a complex system of chemical reactions, which ultimately result in decoding of the mRNA and the production of a protein. The complexity of this reaction system makes it difficult to quantitatively connect its input…

Developing new medical drugs is expensive. Among the first steps is a screening process, in which molecules in existing chemical libraries are tested for activity against a given target. This requires a lot of resources and manpower. Therefore it has…

Luciferase enzymes from fireflies and other beetles have many important applications in molecular biology, biotechnology, analytical chemistry and several other areas. Many novel beetle luciferases with promising properties have been reported in the recent years. However, actual and potential applications…

Recent metabolic engineering practice was briefly reviewed in particular for the useful metabolite production such as natural products and biofuel productions.  With the emphasis on systems biology approach, the metabolic regulation of the main metabolic pathways in E. coli was…

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a large-scale public–private partnership between the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). IMI aims to boost the development of new medicines across Europe by implementing new collaborative endeavours…

Natural remedies, such as those based on traditional Chinese medicines, have become more popular also in western countries over the last 10 years. The composition of these herbal products is largely unknown and difficult to determine. Moreover, since plants respond…

Enzymatic degradation of plant biomass has attracted intensive research interest for the production of economically viable biofuels. Here we present an overview of the recent findings on biocatalysts implicated in the oxidative cleavage of cellulose, including polysaccharide monooxygenases (PMOs or…