Chemical Matters
The official blog of C-GEM
Recap: C-GEM Chats Careers with PUI Profs
Yesterday, C-GEM hosted a “career chat” discussion with two faculty members at primarily undergradua…
Applying to Summer Undergraduate Research Programs: Why, How, and More!
The Center for Genetically Encoded Materials (C-GEM) Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) is…
The Future of the Ribosome and its Role in the Future of the World
Dina Tekle (left) and Nicole Rivera (right) are undergraduate students in the 2021 C-GEM summer rese…
Ribosomes: A vision of the future utilizing antibiotic-ribosome relationships
Alexis Vanzandt (left) and Kaitlyn Szalay (right) are undergraduate students who participated in the…
PylRS innovation and its contribution to the future of research and medicine
Yuna Lee (left) and Emma Yin (right) are undergraduate students who participated in the 2021 C-GEM s…
The journey to creating unnatural polymers using the ribosome
Margaret Adenusi (left) and Alyssa Virola-Iarussi (right) are undergraduate students in the 2021 C-G…
Dealing with the unnatural – the MHC way
Can the antigen recognition process be modulated if the structure of the antigen is modified
Hachimoji DNA: The Eight-letter Genetic Code
Hachimoji DNA contains four natural bases (A, T, C, G) and four extra unnatural bases (P, Z, S, B).
Isolation through unity: creating orthogonal ribosomes through tethered subunit assembly
A new method resolves cross-assembly between wild type and engineered ribosomes.
Sequence-defined Multifunctional Polyethers
For several decades, polyethers, such as polyethylene glycol (PEG) have garnered tremendous interest…
Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) is a powerful way to explore the synthesis of proteins and other polymers outside of the cellular environment
Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) is a powerful way to explore the synthesis of proteins and other …
EvolvR: where precision meets diversity
C-GEM scientists explain EvolvR technology.
Mitigating translation arrest caused by D-α-amino acids
A recent study by Ruben L. Gonzalez Jr. and coworkers provides insight into how to improve the incor…
Driving orthogonality between variant pyrrolysyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs
By Patrick Ginther In a recent 2018 Nature news & views, the work of Jason Chin and co-workers w…
Ronald Breaker’s “Riboswitches and Translation Control”
Riboswitches are defined as RNA structures, typically found in the 5’ untranslated region (5’UTR) of…
Ribosome assembly revealed by cryo-EM
Ribosome assembly is a remarkably complex cellular process. In the yeast large subunit (60S) alone, …
Replacement of a histidine by a non-canonical amino acid to generate a dependent organism
In a recent paper in JACS, Schultz and co-workers present a strategy where replacing a key amino aci…
Addition by subtraction
Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) are responsible for some of the most exotic ribosomally synth…
More peptides with backbone modifications from wild type ribosomes in vitro
the most recent issue of Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, a paper from Matthew Hartman's lab high…