The motivating thought behind this volume is that " if one wants to " make up the rules " of the game of life, one has to start from a realistic view of its players " (Engelen 2008, 2). This may seem self evident but it is an idea that rarely achieves the prominence which it deserves—not least in methodological debates. For example, much ink has been spilled around Friedman's famous 1953 essay ...

Pseudomonas putida KT2440 is an emerging biomanufacturing host amenable for use with renewable carbon streams including aromatics such as para-coumarate. We used a pooled transposon library disrupting nearly all (4,778) non-essential genes to characterize this microbe under common stirred-tank bioreactor parameters quantitative fitness assays. Assessing differential values by monitoring changes...

Poinsettia is an economically important ornamental potted plant in which certain bract colour variants are often obtained by mutation breeding. Previously, poinsettia, we identified Bract1, a GST gene involved the sequestration and transport of anthocyanins to vacuole. This carries short, highly mutable 4-bp repeat its coding region. Loss one unit leads loss function for homozygous mutants, ant...