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Bioengineered
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Biological olfactory and taste systems are natural chemical sensing systems with unique performances for the detection of environmental chemical signals. With the advances in olfactory and taste transduction mechanisms, biomimetic chemical sensors have achieved significant progress due to their promising prospects and potential applications. Biomimetic chemical sensors exploit the unique capability of biological functional components for chemical sensing, which are often sourced from sensing units of biological olfactory or taste systems at the tissue level, cellular level, or molecular level. Specifically, at the cellular level, there are mainly two categories of cells have been employed for the development of biomimetic chemical sensors, which are natural cells and bioengineered cells, respectively. Natural cells are directly isolated from biological olfactory and taste systems, which are convenient to achieve. However, natural cells often suffer from the undefined sensing properties and limited amount of identical cells. On the other hand, bioengineered cells have shown decisive advantages to be applied in the development of biomimetic chemical sensors due to the powerful biotechnology for the reconstruction of the cell sensing properties. Here, we briefly summarized the most recent advances of biomimetic chemical sensors using bioengineered olfactory and taste cells. The development challenges and future trends are discussed as well.
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Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol,
2013]
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Curr Biol,
2011]
Recent work on a Caenorhabditis elegans transmembrane ATPase reveals a central role for the aminophospholipid phosphatidylethanolamine in the production of a class of extracellular vesicles.
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Nat Cell Biol,
2011]
Aurora A kinase is a key regulator of cell division, whose functions were attributed to its ability to phosphorylate diverse substrates. Aurora A is now shown to have a kinase-independent role in the regulation of chromatin-mediated microtubule assembly.
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Elife,
2015]
Chromosome separation is regulated by a cycle that involves a protein undergoing an unusual topological conversion.
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Curr Biol,
2015]
As a microtubule-organizing center, the centrosome undergoes a dramatic increase in size - via expansion of the pericentriolar material - during mitosis. Recent work reveals shared assembly properties of a protein scaffold that facilitates and supports this expansion, a process critical to spindle assembly.
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Cell,
2014]
Li et al. demonstrate that a single interneuron can regulate analog- and digital-like behaviors guided by two different postsynaptic neurons. Releasing a single neurotransmitter onto downstream neurons that express receptors with distinct biophysical properties enables a small set of neurons to direct a range of functional responses.
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Nat Chem Biol,
2009]
Screening a library of expressed cyclic peptides identified clones that reverse the cytotoxicity of alpha-synuclein in yeast and Caenorhabditis elegans. The results suggest a new approach for intervention in Parkinson's disease, and perhaps a druggable target.
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Curr Biol,
2017]
A landmark study has revealed that an interleukin-17-like signaling system modulates a neural circuit that controls the aggregation behavior of nematodes.
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Curr Biol,
2013]
In the defecation motor program of Caenorhabditis elegans, a pacemaker rhythm generated by the intestine leads to the activation of motor neurons controlling enteric muscle contraction. A new study demonstrates that this signal is conveyed by a neuropeptide that is released from intestinal cells and acutely depolarizes the motorneurons, acting much like a classical neurotransmitter.