A Montreal researcher has discovered that nerve cells can bypass the body’s normal protein-making machinery in the same way that viruses do when they infect a cell. Why would they? To produce large quantities of a particular protein under certain physiological conditions.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken the first stab at a “periodic table” of the protein structures – an organized map of the building blocks used over and over again to construct the billions of complex proteins that make up life on Earth. The three-dimensional map depicts similarities and differences among the building blocks, letting scientists visualize the universe of possible protein structures – the many possible twists, turns and folds – and see evolutionary changes that may have occurred with time.