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Tag Archives: proteins
Protein complexity could be our demise
Did you know that badly folded proteins could be the cause of our species’ destruction? Neither did I. I know about nuclear bombs, climate change, asteroid strike and even pandemic as possible doomsday scenarios. I’m aware of predictions that in the not too distant future mankind might be overpowered by or merge with artificial intelligence [...]
Posted in Impact: Proteomics Also tagged Alzheimer’s, DNA, folding, gene-pool, genetic drift, genetics, natural selection, pandemic, Parkinson’s, prions 1 Comment
Hoogsteen base pairs: An alternate structure in DNA
Reverse Hoogsteen base pairing…..Wikipedia Commons I know some of my biases. One of them is knee-jerk skepticism about taking little-tested scientific results and blowing them up to “…a cure for cancer” or “…revolutionize the electronics industry.” However, like most people I also have a bias to be curious about interesting, if somewhat unusual scientific findings. [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged base pairs, biochemistry, DNA, double-helix, epigenetics, genetic coding, genetics, histones, Hoogsteen, NMR, RNA 3 Comments
Almahata Sitta: A meteorite suggests a new way to form amino acids
Asteroid collision, NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture….credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt Finding amino acids, the building blocks of life, in meteorites is not new. Finding them in a meteorite that is a fragment of an asteroid collision, a piece formed at more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit (1100 degrees Celsius) – now that makes astrobiologists [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged Almahata Sitta, amino acid, asteroid, chirality, exogenous life, Hubble, life origin, meteorite, NASA Leave a comment
New for epigenetics: Active pseudogenes and RNA as gene regulator
How is it that the human genome, with about 23,000 protein coding genes, can produce such a complicated organism as the human being, when the laboratory flatworm (C. elegans, a relatively simple organism) has about 20,000 coding genes? It seems fairly obvious that there must be something else at work in more complex organisms that [...]
Posted in Impact: Cell Biology Also tagged cancer, cell biology, ceRNA, DNA, epigenetics, genome, microRNA, molecular biology, mRNA, pseudogene, PTEN, PTENP1, RNA Leave a comment
New link between proteins and memory
Just as geneticists are finding that proteins play a complex and often crucial role in the expression of genes, the link between memory and proteins presents much new territory for neuroscience. That makes it exciting, for those in the field; and tantalizingly inconclusive. Work being done by Dr. Nahum Sonenberg at McGill University (Canada) has [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged 4E-BP2, deamidation, memory, neuroscience, proteomics Leave a comment
New study: Tracking proteins that repair DNA
There are some lines of research in the development of science that in all likelihood will not have a ‘breakthrough’ – a big rush of discovery. Instead, the discovery will be piecemeal; sometimes it will be discovery in very small pieces accumulating until a hypothesis is verified. Not all tracks like this are important, but [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Also tagged DNA, genes, genetics, proteomics, repair complex, UvrA Leave a comment
Cutting cancer cell immortality short
One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they don’t die of old age. In a sense, they’re immortal – though of course they can be killed. The main reason for their longevity has been traced to telomeres a strip of non-coding genes at the ends of chromosomes. When normal cells replicate very often [...]
Posted in News: Major Disease Cures Also tagged cancer, chromosomes, Fbx4, telomerase, telomeres, TIN2, TRF1 1 Comment
Ribozymes and the origin of life
It could be called the search for the origin of life, but instead of a sweeping theory (primordial soup and lightning), microbiologists are concentrating on the many pieces that, one way or another, came together to constitute ‘life.’ Some new research from a team at the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA) points to the smallest [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, enzyme, microbiology, origin of life, primordial soup, ribozyme, RNA Leave a comment
New study and research tool: DNA mutations and molecular effects
Genetic mutations can cause diseases. That’s been known for many decades. However, there are tens of thousands of known mutations that can happen to the human genome. Not all of them cause diseases. Also, it’s known that mutations that have an impact on biological processes usually rearrange the amino acids that build proteins. However, the [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged AAS, amino acids, computer modeling, DNA, mutations, statistical analysis Leave a comment
Prions bad. Prion shaping good – for memory
Understanding how memory in the brain works remains one of the most difficult and insight-resistant issues in neuroscience. Also, like most things about the brain (human brains, any brains), the more we look, the more complex it becomes. The research by a team from Kansas and New York (USA) on prion-like proteins is a good [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Also tagged brain, CPEB, memory, neuroscience, prions, virus Leave a comment
Explaining how a protein can perform multiple roles
It’s been known for more than a decade that some cell proteins can carry out multiple functions. For example, it was discovered in 1999 that the protein TyrRS (explained shortly) participated not only in the building of enzymes, but also could function to stimulate the growth of blood vessels. Discovering that the same protein could [...]
Posted in Impact: Cell Biology Also tagged amino acid, blood, cell biology, molecular biology, tRNA Leave a comment
Basic finding: Proteins don’t need to unfold to change
We’re talking proteins in the cells of all living things. They don’t have to unfold to change shape. If that sounds cryptic, it’s because that finding is about some of the most fundamental processes of life, and we’re just beginning to learn about them. In this case, proteins – which are the building blocks of [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged amino acids, atomic chemistry, cell biology, chemical pathways, DNA, folding, molecular biology, RNA Leave a comment
Cracking the bacterial immune system
Until a few years ago, biologists did not know that bacteria have their own immune system. It was known that most bacteria are killed by invading viruses, called bacteriophages, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that bacteria had developed some way of combating the attacks, but the details of such an immune system were [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged bacteria, bacteriophage, CAS genes, DNA, immune system, RNA Leave a comment
Stapling peptides to drug the undruggable
Turning specific genes on and off is something Nature does routinely. Not so for scientists. In particular, a class of proteins that control whether certain genes are activated or not, so called transcription factors, have been considered unreachable. Because of their complex folded configurations, transcription proteins are highly resistant to modification and have been considered [...]
Posted in News: Major Disease Cures Also tagged cancer, gene expression, genes, NOTCH, peptides, signaling pathways Leave a comment
A keystone discovery: Proteins and synaptic vesicles