Link Between Cell Death & Protein Clumps Could Lead to Possible Treatment for Parkinson’s
A rogue protein involved in Parkinson’s disease that wrecks catastrophic damage has been tracked down by researchers in work that could help find a new…
Protein
Proteins Engineered With Predictable Structures
Proteins fold spontaneously into precise conformation, time after time, optimized by evolution. Yet given the number of contortions possible for chains of amino acids, dictating…
SSRL Validates Anti-Flu Protein Design
A team of scientists designed proteins from scratch to have a high affinity and high specificity for targets on flu viruses, validating the two best…
“Arsenic-Life” Bacterium Prefers Phosphate Over Arsenate
Researchers that claimed that the GFAJ-1 bacterium had a preference for arsenic instead of phosphorous in its DNA have been somewhat refuted. A new study…
Study Reveals How Lis1 Regulates Dynein Motility
By using common baker’s yeast as a model system, Harvard researchers discovered how the key motor protein dynein interacts with a molecule called Lis1. Molecular…
SIRT1 Protein Slows Aging and Protects Against Diabetes
A new study from MIT looks at what happens when the SIRT1 protein is missing from adipose tissue in mice, finding that SIRT1 protects from…
New Design Makes Previously Inaccessible Proteins Vulnerable to Drugs
A team of researchers at Yale University have identified a molecular signal that allows potentially therapeutic proteins to hitch a ride into cells using vesicles,…
Chitinase 3-like-1, A Key to Fighting Pneumonia
While working with mice, scientists at Yale University found that the protein Chitinase 3-like-1 (Chi3l1) was crucial in regulating the immune response to Streptococcus pneumonia,…
Genes Down-Regulated in Spaceflight Extend the Lifespan of Worms
A team of scientists discovered that spaceflight suppressed the accumulation of toxic proteins and a group of genes, which when lowered in worms back on…
Proteins in a Cancerous Tumor’s Microenvironment Have Role in Drug Resistance
Two different studies published in the journal Nature reveal that cancers can resist destruction by drugs with the help of proteins recruited from surrounding tissues….
A New and Possibly More Effective Method for Editing Genomes
A team of scientists at the Berkeley Lab has discovered the mechanism behind the RNA-guided cleavage of double-stranded DNA that is central to the bacterial…
The Mechanics of Cellular Wound Healing
A newly published study describes how a cell reorganizes its infrastructure to heal a wound, finding that for this process the cell uses formins, key…
p65 Protein and its Interaction with Telomerase RNA
Using both X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, UCLA biochemists have examined the structure of p65 protein and its interaction with telomerase RNA. UCLA…
Evolution Helps Deduce the Shape of 18 Families of Transmembrane Proteins
Scientists at Harvard Medical School developed algorithms that allowed them to use evolution as their guide to deduce the three-dimensional structure of 18 families of…
Nanoscale Molecular Cages May Aid in Drug and Vaccine Delivery
Biochemists at UCLA used computer models to identify proteins that could be combined to form tiny molecular cages that are hundreds of times smaller than…
New Antibody Drug Boosts the Immune System’s Capacity to Fight Cancer
A new study using antibody drug BMS-936558 (MDX-1106, anti-PD-1), resulted tumor shrinkage of at least 30 percent in 18 percent of the lung cancer patients,…
LCLS Analyzes Tiny Protein Crystals
By using the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford to analyzed tiny protein crystals, scientists demonstrated the potential of free-electron lasers for obtaining the structures…
Researchers Identify BAD as Key Seizure-Suppressing Protein
New research from the Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute examines why a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates can reduce…