With cholera on the rampage in Haiti and almost 40 other countries, scientists are reporting the development of a key advance that could provide a fast, simple test to detect the toxin that causes the disease. The report appears in ACS’ journal Bioc…
Proteins are molecular machines that transport substances, catalyze chemical reactions, pump ions, and identify signaling substances. They are chains of amino acids and the individual amino acid sequence is known for many of them. However, the funct…
WHAT:
Scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have determined the complete genetic blueprints for 13 different strains of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. The achievement should lead to a better un…
Suncica “Sunny” Canic was good at math in school, so that’s what she pursued as a career. But she always liked medicine, too. When she moved to Houston, Texas, and met some cardiologists at a party, she started talking with them about what they …
Mathematical models have given physicists a new look at DNA’s chemical counterpart, RNA. The models — showing that RNA behaves differently depending on the temperature of its environment — may help biologists better understand how life evolved on Earth.
Biomedical research and the development of powerful new diagnostic tools will be hobbled in the U.S. if the government fails to adequately fund mathematics, physics and engineering research, major drivers, of progress in biology, according to the executive director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, headquartered at UCSF. Physics underlies powerful medical imaging diagnostics such as MRI and CAT capabilities, while mathematical tools are essential to tease apart complex signaling networks active in nearly all essential cell processes, said Marvin Cassman, PhD. “If we don’t adequately support physics, engineering and mathematics, we put the brakes on medically-related progress as surely as we slow advances in math and physics,” he said.
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered how an embryo initially attaches to the wall of the uterus?what appears to be one of the earliest steps needed to establish a successful pregnancy. Specifically, the researchers found that 6 days after an egg is fertilized, the embryo uses specialized molecules on its surface and molecules on the surface of the uterus to attach itself to the wall of the uterus.
Researchers have determined the structure of a protein with a surprising feature in it: a knot. This is the first time a knot has been found in a protein from the most ancient type of single-celled organism, an archaebacterium, and one of only a few times a knot has been seen in any protein structure. This very unusual protein shape finding is a result from the NIGMS Protein Structure Initiative, a 10-year effort to determine 10,000 unique protein structures using fast, highly automated methods.