Imagine that you and your friend want to start a poultry farm to produce eggs. If possible, one excellent way to reduce the cost is by removing all the features that are not necessary for laying eggs - feathers, legs, eyes, and other sensory perceptions - from the chick. It is as if it were born anew only to lay eggs and nothing else! This is the concept echoed in synthetic biology, to engineer unicellular organisms doing only intended tasks and nothing else. Synthetic biology, sometimes called "Nature 2.0," is an emerging field in life science with enormous potential to [...]

Don’t you remember, as a child, holding a lizard in your clenched hand, only to find its wriggling tail when you opened it? Although it is a traumatic experience for the creature, it is thrilling to the mischievous, inquisitive young mind. A few days later, in your backyard, to your amazement, you might have observed the same lizard with a small growth from its broken tail! Some lizards and other animals can lose their tails or arms, but quickly grow new ones. You might wonder why it did not happen to other animals. You might also ask, why humans aren't [...]

The 2022 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a trio for the contribution of "click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry." Click chemistry is a new method of manufacturing molecules that can accelerate drug discovery by utilizing a few practical and reliable reactions. The winner of the 2022 Chemistry Nobel PrizeDr. Carolyn R. Bertozzi is a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. In 2000, she started utilizing click chemistry in living organisms. She developed a bioorthogonal method which involves a set of reactions in living organisms. These reactions, though, do not disrupt the cell's regular activity. Such reactions are used to [...]