Penicillin acylase (PA) from Escherichia coli can catalyze the coupling of an acyl group to penicillin- and cephalosporin-derived beta-lactam nuclei, a conversion that can be used for the industrial synthesis of beta-lactam antibiotics. The modest synthetic properties of the wild-type enzyme make it …

Mammalian promoters can be separated into two classes, conserved TATA box-enriched promoters, which initiate at a well-defined site, and more plastic, broad and evolvable CpG-rich promoters. We have sequenced tags corresponding to several hundred thousand transcription start sites (TSSs) in the mouse …

The exploitation of the metagenome for novel biocatalysts by functional screening is determined by the ability to express the respective genes in a surrogate host. The probability of recovering a certain gene thereby depends on its abundance in the environmental DNA used for library construction, the …