EPFL researchers found that E. coli in nutrient broth with 62.5% plasma-activated water reached about twice the control's viable count. For anyone using the water as a disinfectant, the lethal dose has to be measured in the liquid actually being treated.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+5
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers made millimetre-sized beads whose structural material is the enzymes themselves, with no inert carrier. The format aims to make biocatalysts as easy to store, ship and dose as industrial chemistry requires.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives55
- Confidence50
ISTA biologists report that starving E. coli use phages and CRISPR-Cas to swap and absorb DNA more than 100 times as often as spontaneous mutation. The team describes it as a primitive form of sexual reproduction that may speed how populations adapt.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence45
E. coli survived longer in poultry-amended Georgia onion soils than in untreated soil across two seasons, a Risk Analysis study found. Humidity went with longer survival and wind with shorter, so growers' food-safety plans may need to reflect local weather.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
A microfluidic experiment held the present identical and varied the past. That design is what separates a reaction from a memory. A mathematical model then placed that memory in ribosomes, though no one watched a ribosome directly.
Reality
- Evidence35
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
Researchers in Japan engineered gut E. coli to make or withhold putrescine, and the producing strains raised male fly lifespan to 13.8 days from 11.0. The design isolates a microbial metabolite as a cause, though the effect broke down in females.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
A team trained on antimicrobial peptide data to rank a library of 1.7 million polymers, then sent to the bench the candidates its models split hardest over, on the theory that the models' disagreement marks the experiments most likely to be informative.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives60
- Confidence60
A Seoul National University group rearranged a self-splicing intron so bacterial transcripts join their own ends inside the cell. Most of the extra protein came from mRNA that lasts longer, and the design worked in three hosts.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption12
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives65
- Confidence58
Two Science papers name the protein VIPR and show it silencing a reporter gene and blocking phage in E. coli, guided by an RNA that reads two DNA letters and skips the third, a targeting rule anyone borrowing it will have to design around.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives50
- Confidence58
Gut phage therapy usually fails because you cannot get enough phage to enough bacteria in time. A team writing in Nature Microbiology built a resident E. coli that makes the phage on site, and it protected mice against an oral Salmonella challenge.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives45
- Confidence62
Sang Yup Lee's group at KAIST rebuilt the bacterium's metabolism to assemble two aromatic PHA polymers from sugar. The best titre reached 52.8 grams per litre. The stronger of the two polymers was the weaker producer.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives62
- Confidence55
Purified bacterial mRNA aggregates in a tube, roughly as physical chemistry predicts. Whitehead researchers report that real E. coli sequences interact less than computer-made synonyms, and read that gap as selection for solubility.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives62
- Confidence55
The enzyme that loads methionine onto tRNA in this cell-invading bacterium is twice the size of the E. coli version. Rebecca Alexander's lab at Wake Forest reports that the extra half looks like a second enzyme.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
UC San Diego's cryo-EM structures show E. coli's transcription enzyme accepting hachimoji letters, with a companion paper finding it needs no hydrogen bonds to do so. Neither experiment happened inside a living cell.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives62
- Confidence66
In an aligned fluid, a Caltech group reports in PNAS, colonies grow as chains one cell wide that run straight and then kink in a single tight spot, which hands part of colony architecture to the medium.
Reality
- Evidence56
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap−8
- Incentives55
- Confidence46
Harvard's Church lab reports AGENTEX in Nature: engineered tRNAs and ribosomes in a cell-free mix. Nobody has to recode an organism to prototype a genetic code any more.
Reality
- Evidence78
- Adoption12
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives58
- Confidence74
AI models generated hundreds of thousands of phage designs and 16 of the built ones replicated. Once a genome can be authored rather than copied, matching orders to known threats stops being enough.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives40
- Confidence35
EMBL Heidelberg reports in Nature that T7 phage phosphorylates nearly the whole E. coli proteome within minutes, disabling defence systems that work by different mechanisms.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives58
- Confidence52