Synthetic biology approaches in drug discovery and pharmaceutical biotechnology

Synthetic biology is the attempt to apply the concepts of engineering to biological systems with the aim to create organisms with new emergent properties. These organisms might have desirable novel biosynthetic capabilities, act as biosensors or help us to understand the intricacies of living systems. This approach has the potential to assist the discovery and production of pharmaceutical compounds at various stages. New sources of bioactive compounds can be created in the form of genetically encoded small molecule libraries. The recombination of individual parts has been employed to design proteins that act as biosensors, which could be used to identify and quantify molecules of interest. New biosynthetic pathways may be designed by stitching together enzymes with desired activities, and genetic code expansion can be used to introduce new functionalities into peptides and proteins to increase their chemical scope and biological stability. This review aims to give an insight into recently developed individual components and modules that might serve as parts in a synthetic biology approach to pharmaceutical biotechnology

Complex and liquid hydrides for energy storage

© 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.The research on complex hydrides for hydrogen storage was initiated by the discovery of Ti as a hydrogen sorption catalyst in NaAlH4 by Boris Bogdanovic in 1996. A large number of new complex hydride materials in various forms and combinations have been synthesized and characterized, and the knowledge regarding the properties of complex hydrides and the synthesis methods has grown enormously since then. A significant portion of the research groups active in the field of complex hydrides is collaborators in the International Energy Agreement Task 32. This paper reports about the important issues in the field of complex hydride research, i.e. the synthesis of borohydrides, the thermodynamics of complex hydrides, the effects of size and confinement, the hydrogen sorption mechanism and the complex hydride composites as well as the properties of liquid complex hydrides. This paper is the result of the collaboration of several groups and is an excellent summary of the recent achievements