Oct 2026· ACS Synthetic Biology· 0 citations· 31 references
RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
Abstract
Programmable RNA switches enable target-dependent regulation of cell-free protein synthesis. Here, we report a photo-activatable RNA switch using photocleavable Lock DNA (pcl-Lock) to enable optical control of in vitro translation. Synthesized by solid-phase methods, pcl-Lock incorporates a coumarin-based photocleavable linker that maintains the RNA switch in an inactive state. Irradiation with 456 nm light cleaves the linker, releasing inhibition and activating translation. Light-triggered activation produced β-galactosidase, yielding approximately 4-fold and 30-fold increases in fluorescence and glucose signals, respectively. Native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis confirms efficient photocleavage of the pcl-Lock strand, while control experiments verify that light-dependent activation does not occur with the Lock strand lacking the photocleavable linker. This strategy enables optical regulation of cell-free protein synthesis and establishes a strategy for integrating photochemical control with programmable gene regulation.
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
This study investigates how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies and identifies its enablers and inhibitors, and shows the potential of the method-in-action framework to investigate the Lean startup approach in non-startup context.
Henry Edison, Nina M. Smørsgård, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 78 citations· ⚡6
This paper highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology, provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory, and proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.
D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· SSE@SIGSOFT FSE· 56 citations· ⚡4
This study conducts a multiple case study on twenty European software startups and proposes a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups, and identifies factors that occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in earlystage software startups.
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 44 citations· ⚡5
It is demonstrated that linker-free PROTACs can outperform traditional designs, marking a paradigm shift in PROTAC development for targeted protein degradation.
Pinal, a 16-billion-parameter foundation model that produces protein candidates from natural-language functional descriptions, supports natural language as a high-level interface for candidate generation in protein design, enabling programmable exploration with reduced reliance on manually specified structural or seque...
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
