Synthetic biology as basic research tool! Cool!
Great paper from John Dueber in the Keasling lab about using synthetic scaffold proteins to improve the function of an engineered metabolic pathway. Besides the ridiculous improvement in pathway function because of having a perfectly tuned pathway, this is neat because the scaffold proteins come from mammalian cells, but are functional in bacteria where there is nothing that can interact with the scaffold proteins to interfere. There are many possibilities of adapting this kind of scaffold to other projects (including mine!) and of using this kind of thing to better understand how protein interactions work and evolve. Awesome!
