Rewriting thegenetic rulesTJason Chin has found a way to convince cells to
assemble exotic proteins in a breakthrough for
synthetic biology – all you need is live RNA editing...Destruction of the Brazilian Amazon
rainforest has reached the highest
levels in a decade – but tracking
such activity is challenging, not least
because of the size of the forest itself.
The Brazilian Institute of Environment
and Renewable Natural Resources
(IBAMA) uses Landsat satellite images
to monitor forest cover and trigger
alerts when changes are suspected –
but at a resolution of just 30 metres,
it’s hard to pinpoint the actual cause.
“To send an anti-deforestation task
force to areas falsely flagged as logged
is costly,” says Pontus Olofsson, an
associate research professor at Boston
University who uses satellite images to
study deforestation around the world.
Now, MapBiomas, a network of
universities, tech companies and
NGOs, has found a way to track illegal
deforestation in near real-time. Its
platform collates data from the Brazilian
government’s existing alert systems
and cross-checks the area with much
higher resolution images – down to
three metres – captured by miniature
satellites from Planet Labs, a private
company based in San Francisco.
To save time and money, the
MapBiomas platform zooms in
only on areas flagged for potential
deforestation, sourcing detailed images
taken before and after the incident to
produce a report for prosecution.
The platform launched in June
following a test phase that produced
some 5,000 automatic reports in two
and a half months. “The next step will
be to guarantee that people are actually
doing something with it,” says Tasso
Azevedo, who co-ordinates the project.
He adds that making the MapBiomas
tool freely available gives environmental
agencies little choice but to take action
and prosecute violators. The public can
also view the reports, which he hopes
will put additional pressure on the
government to tackle deforestation:
“The public can know whether these
alerts are being tracked and actioned.”
Sabrina Weiss mapbiomas.orghe lexicon of life is so limited. If only scientists
could expand its repertoire of building blocks, they
could revolutionise our ability to build huge, complex
proteins that could lead to a new generation of drugs.
All living things on Earth are built from proteins
created from the same 20 amino acids. Now, scien-
tists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of
Molecular Biology, Cambridge, are getting closer to
developing polymers composed of new amino acids.
Of the 400-plus scientists currently working in
the laboratory, the largest space is reserved for a
team run by Jason Chin, which has assembled tools
to synthesise polymers far beyond the complexity
of anything currently made by chemists. Chin’s
team has done this by redesigning the ribosome – a
molecular factory found in all living cells that synthe-
sises proteins, turning genes into flesh and blood.
While industrial methods assemble simple
chemical units to make polymers, the ribosome
shuffles the 20 basic amino acids to sculpt elaborate
3D proteins inside living things. Chin’s work paves
the way for an engineered ribosome that could
assemble a much larger repertoire of amino acids
into molecules more complex than anything in nature.THE DETECTIVES
OF DEFORESTATION<‘We could address problems in biologythat would otherwise be impossible’- JASON CHIN
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