• How to Fine-Tune a Ri­boswitch

    by Janie — It has the inklings of a lame bi­ol­ogy joke, but in ac­tu­al­ity has pro­found im­pli­ca­tions among mi­cro­bial com­mu­ni­ties: What's the sim­i­lar­ity be­tween male moths and RNA? The an­swer is the abil­ity to de­tect ex­tremely spe­cific com­pounds. Like male moths that can de­tect a sin­gle pheromone mol­e­cule...

  • Of Terms in Bi­ol­ogy: Ri­boswitch

    by Merry Youle — Re­cently we fea­tured the term ap­tamer, and noted how use­ful these com­pounds are for re­searchers. We were talk­ing of syn­thetic ap­tamers. But nat­ural ones, in the form of RNA mol­e­cules, are part of an el­e­gant mech­a­nism that reg­u­lates gene ex­pres­sion in re­sponse to chang­ing cel­lu­lar lev­els of spe­cific metabo­lites. These tal­ented…