Engineering the third wave of biocatalysis

Over the past ten years, scientific and technological advances have established biocatalysis as a practical and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional metallo- and organocatalysis in chemical synthesis, both in the laboratory and on an industrial scale. Key advances in DNA sequencing and gene synthesis are at the base of tremendous progress in tailoring biocatalysts by protein engineering and design, and the ability to reorganize enzymes into new biosynthetic pathways. To highlight these achievements, here we discuss applications of protein-engineered biocatalysts ranging from commodity chemicals to advanced pharmaceutical intermediates that use enzyme catalysis as a key step.     

Filtered Backprojection Reconstruction with Depth-Dependent Filtering

A direct filtered-backprojection(FBP) reconstruction algorithm is presented for circular cone-beam computed tomography(CB-CT) that allows the filter operation to be applied efficiently with shift-variant band-pass characteristics on the kernel function.Our algorithm is derived from the ramp-filter based FBP method of Feldkamp et al.and obtained by decomposing the ramp filtering into a convolution involving the Hilbert kernel(global operation) and a subsequent differentiation operation(local operation).The d...