Publications by authors named "G W Orr"
Article Synopsis
- Plant leaf tissues present challenges for imaging due to chlorophyll and pigments causing background fluorescence.
- Lattice light-sheet microscopy utilizes Bessel beams to focus on a thin region, enabling the visualization of fluorescent molecules while minimizing interference from surrounding pigments.
- By combining this technique with STORM super-resolution, researchers observed immune response proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana, revealing significant receptor internalization and changes in protein colocalization, indicating potential immune response pathways.
Enzyme-mediated polyethylene terephthalate (PET) depolymerization has recently emerged as a sustainable solution for PET recycling. Towards an industrial-scale implementation of this technology, various strategies are being explored to enhance PET depolymerization (PETase) activity and improve enzyme stability, expression, and purification processes. Recently, rational engineering of a known PET hydrolase (LCC-leaf compost cutinase) has resulted in the isolation of a variant harboring four-point mutations (LCC-ICCG), presenting increased PETase activity and thermal stability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioenergy sorghum is a low-input, drought-resilient, deep-rooting annual crop that has high biomass yield potential enabling the sustainable production of biofuels, biopower, and bioproducts. Bioenergy sorghum's 4-5 m stems account for ~80% of the harvested biomass. Stems accumulate high levels of sucrose that could be used to synthesize bioethanol and useful biopolymers if information about cell-type gene expression and regulation in stems was available to enable engineering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Lipids are regulators of insulitis and β-cell death in type 1 diabetes development, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we investigated how the islet lipid composition and downstream signaling regulate β-cell death.
Methods: We performed lipidomics using three models of insulitis: human islets and EndoC-βH1 β cells treated with the pro-inflammatory cytokines interlukine-1β and interferon-γ, and islets from pre-diabetic non-obese mice.
Article Synopsis
- Biological nitrogen fixation by microbes like Burkholderia vietnamiensis can enhance nitrogen availability in non-nodulating plants, which was studied using poplar trees as a model.
- The study found dynamic nitrogen-fixing activity in colonies of the bacteria, with only about 11% actively expressing the nifH gene, indicating uneven expression among genetically identical cells.
- Collaborative methods including imaging and metabolomics revealed that nifH expression is localized to the root elongation zone of poplar, highlighting unique interactions between the endophyte and roots.