The glycine-serine interconversion, catalysed by glycine decarboxylase and serine hydroxymethyltransferase, is an important reaction of primary metabolism in all organisms including plants, by providing one-carbon units for many biosynthetic reactions. In plants, in addition, it is an integral part of the photorespiratory metabolic pathway and produces large amounts of photorespiratory CO(2) wi...

The relative ease of using Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)associated proteins (Cas-proteins) in genome editing has rapidly made this RNA-guided endonuclease system the method of choice in almost all current applications involving genetic manipulations, with Cas9 from S. pyogenes (SpCas9) being the most well characterized and broadly used [1]. Compared to the e...

Francisella tularensis is a facultative intracellular pathogen that causes the disease tularemia. F. tularensis subsp. tularensis causes the most severe disease in humans and has been classified as a Category A select agent and potential bioweapon. There is currently no vaccine approved for human use, making genetic manipulation of this organism critical to unraveling the genetic basis of patho...

The discovery of the third domain of life, the Archaea, is one of the most exciting findings of the last century. These remarkable prokaryotes are well known for their adaptations to extreme environments; however, Archaea have also conquered moderate environments. Many of the archaeal biochemical processes, such as methane production, are unique in nature and therefore of great scientific inter...

Stem cells have the remarkable potential for self-renewal and differentiation into many cell types in the body during early life and development. In addition, in many tissues they constitute a source of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish damaged or dead cells. After division, each new cell has the potential either to retain the stem cell status or to differe...

In biotechnology has been concentrated to review alternative routes for the production of natural compounds. Plant cell culture systems are viable alternatives for the production of secondary metabolites that are of commercial importance in food and pharmaceutical industries. However, relatively very few cultures synthesize these compounds over extended periods in amounts comparable to those fo...

Feature manipulation refers to the process by which the input space of a machine learning task is altered in order to improve the learning quality and performance. Three major aspects of feature manipulation are feature construction, feature ranking and feature selection. This thesis proposes a new filter-based methodology for feature manipulation in classification problems using genetic progra...

A conditional centromere was constructed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by placing the centromere of chromosome III immediately downstream from the inducible GAL1 promoter from S. cerevisiae. By utilizing growth conditions that favor either transcriptional induction (galactose-carbon source) or repression (glucose-carbon source) from the GAL1 promoter, centromere function can be switched off or on...

The objective of our study was to investigate young people's attitudes towards modern genetics and biotechnology. Quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted among high school students in Rio de Janeiro. These included a survey of students in nine public and private schools as well as focus groups for a complementary analysis of their attitudes and perceptions with respect to these subj...

The development and widespread use of genetically altered mice to study the role of various proteins in biological control systems have led to a renewed interest in methodologies and approaches for evaluating physiological phenotypes. As a result, cross-disciplinary approaches have become essential for fully realizing the potential of these new and powerful animal models. The combination of cla...