The scientists at the Gladstone Institutes who discovered new protein fragments in semen that enhance the ability of HIV to infect new cells say their work could point the way to powerful new microbicides to help curb the global spread of HIV/AIDS. In research carried out four years ago, German researchers discovered that HIV transmission […]
In research with profound implications for public health, scientists have created entirely new strains of infectious prions in the laboratory by simply mixing infectious prions from one species with the normal prion proteins of another species. According to the scientists’ report in Cell, the new prions produced symptoms in laboratory animals that differ from any […]
Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have turned protein folding into a competitive computer game and are hoping to harness the brainpower of gamers worldwide to make medical breakthroughs. Their game, called Foldit, uses people’s natural 3-D problem-solving skills to tackle conundrums in how protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes. “We’re hopefully […]
As revealed by the Human Genome Project, only a small fraction of the 3 billion “letter” DNA code actually instructs cells to manufacture proteins, the workhorses of most life processes. This has raised the question of what the remaining part of the human genome does. Now, scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and the […]
Scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered a protein that causes two neighboring cells to fuse and become one super-cell. Such functionality is critical for building muscles, which rely on hundreds, or even thousands, of super-cells to make large-scale motion smooth and coordinated. Writing about the discovery in Developmental Cell, researcher Elizabeth Chen compared the new […]
Exploring methods to protect living organisms from chronic or acute doses of radiation, military researchers say they have uncovered how an unusual bacterium manages to deal with radiation exposure that would kill any other living creature. Describing their work in PLoS Biology, the researchers from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) say […]
Reporting in the journal Science, researchers from the US and Israel say they have cloned a gene from a variety of wild wheat that dramatically increases the protein, zinc and iron content in the grain; a finding that could go a long way to negating the nutritional deficiencies affecting hundreds of millions of people around […]
Proteins like to keep themselves busy, and one of the tasks they perform is the discharging of excess energy generated during metabolism. Usually, this is done by ferrying electrons to chemicals outside the cell, thus maintaining energy flow in the cell and keeping the cell alive. Now, scientists from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest […]
A significant step toward a new approach to protein engineering has been reported by University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) scientists in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We are learning to control proteins in a new way,” said UCLA’s Giovanni Zocchi. The new approach involves mimicking essential cellular control mechanisms and Zocchi’s […]
