Emily Leproust is an American scientist and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder [1] of Twist Bioscience, a public company working on DNA synthesis. The company harnesses synthetic biology, providing tools to manufacture insulin from yeast, to tackle malaria, [2] produce spider silk at scale [3] or store information on DNA. [4] [5] She was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award in 2020. [6]
Leproust earned an M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry [7] in 1995 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry & Nucleic Acids Chemistry from the University of Houston in 2001. [8] She worked for the company Agilent where she was Director of Applications and Chemistry R&D—Genomics before starting the company Twist Bioscience.
Leproust participated in a March 2021 tabletop exercise at the Munich Security Conference simulating an outbreak of weaponized monkeypox. [9]
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".
The signal recognition particle (SRP) is an abundant, cytosolic, universally conserved ribonucleoprotein that recognizes and targets specific proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum in eukaryotes and the plasma membrane in prokaryotes.
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate, abbreviated NADP+ or, in older notation, TPN (triphosphopyridine nucleotide), is a cofactor used in anabolic reactions, such as the Calvin cycle and lipid and nucleic acid syntheses, which require NADPH as a reducing agent ('hydrogen source'). NADPH is the reduced form, whereas NADP+ is the oxidized form. NADP+ is used by all forms of cellular life.
In chemistry, a molecular knot is a mechanically interlocked molecular architecture that is analogous to a macroscopic knot. Naturally-forming molecular knots are found in organic molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins. It is not certain that naturally occurring knots are evolutionarily advantageous to nucleic acids or proteins, though knotting is thought to play a role in the structure, stability, and function of knotted biological molecules. The mechanism by which knots naturally form in molecules, and the mechanism by which a molecule is stabilized or improved by knotting, is ambiguous. The study of molecular knots involves the formation and applications of both naturally occurring and chemically synthesized molecular knots. Applying chemical topology and knot theory to molecular knots allows biologists to better understand the structures and synthesis of knotted organic molecules.
Chemical biology is a scientific discipline between the fields of chemistry and biology. The discipline involves the application of chemical techniques, analysis, and often small molecules produced through synthetic chemistry, to the study and manipulation of biological systems. Although often confused with biochemistry, which studies the chemistry of biomolecules and regulation of biochemical pathways within and between cells, chemical biology remains distinct by focusing on the application of chemical tools to address biological questions.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Steven Albert Benner is an American chemist. He has been a professor at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and most recently at the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology (TWIST) and the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution. Benner has also founded the companies EraGen Biosciences and Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC.
Eukaryotic DNA replication is a conserved mechanism that restricts DNA replication to once per cell cycle. Eukaryotic DNA replication of chromosomal DNA is central for the duplication of a cell and is necessary for the maintenance of the eukaryotic genome.
Single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing is a parallelized single molecule DNA sequencing method. Single-molecule real-time sequencing utilizes a zero-mode waveguide (ZMW). A single DNA polymerase enzyme is affixed at the bottom of a ZMW with a single molecule of DNA as a template. The ZMW is a structure that creates an illuminated observation volume that is small enough to observe only a single nucleotide of DNA being incorporated by DNA polymerase. Each of the four DNA bases is attached to one of four different fluorescent dyes. When a nucleotide is incorporated by the DNA polymerase, the fluorescent tag is cleaved off and diffuses out of the observation area of the ZMW where its fluorescence is no longer observable. A detector detects the fluorescent signal of the nucleotide incorporation, and the base call is made according to the corresponding fluorescence of the dye.
FlexGen was a biotechnology company based in Leiden, Netherlands. FlexGen was a spin-off from Leiden University Medical Centre and Dutch Space and had proprietary technologies for laser based in-situ synthesis of oligonucleotides and other biomolecules. On 21 December 2015, Flexgen Bv in Leiden was declared bankrupt by the court in Gelderland Source.
Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. is an American biotechnology company founded in 2004 that develops and manufactures systems for gene sequencing and some novel real time biological observation. PacBio has two principal sequencing platforms: single-molecule real-time sequencing (SMRT), based on the properties of zero-mode waveguides and sequencing by binding (SBB) chemistry, which uses native nucleotides and scarless incorporation for DNA binding and extension.
Massive parallel sequencing or massively parallel sequencing is any of several high-throughput approaches to DNA sequencing using the concept of massively parallel processing; it is also called next-generation sequencing (NGS) or second-generation sequencing. Some of these technologies emerged between 1993 and 1998 and have been commercially available since 2005. These technologies use miniaturized and parallelized platforms for sequencing of 1 million to 43 billion short reads per instrument run.
DNA digital data storage is the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA.
David Ruchien Liu is an American molecular biologist and chemist. He is the Richard Merkin Professor, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics at King's College London, Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. From 1 March 2024, Hubbard became the director of Europe's Life Science Data Infrastructure ELIXIR.
Sir David Klenerman is a British biophysical chemist and a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Tom Brown FRSC FRSE is a British chemist, biotechnologist, and entrepreneur. He is the Professor of Nucleic acid chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. Currently, he is serving as the President of the Chemical Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is best known for his contribution in the field of DNA Repair, DNA Click chemistry, and in the application of Molecular genetics in forensics and diagnostics.
Maddika Subba Reddy is an Indian cell biologist and the head of the Laboratory of Cell Death and Cell Survival (LCDCS) of the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics. A Wellcome-DBT Senior Fellow, Reddy is known for his studies cell signaling and phosphatases. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2017/18.
Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Nicholas Goldman is a group leader and senior scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, England. He began working at the EBI in 2002, and became a senior scientist there in 2009. His group's research focuses on evolutionary genetics and genomics. He and his EBI colleague Ewan Birney, along with other researchers, developed a tool for DNA digital data storage, on which they successfully encoded all the sonnets of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, a PDF of the 1953 paper "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and a photo of their own institute. They described their results in a 2013 paper in Nature.