Quantcast

Normal nerve cells can mimic viruses

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.

'Periodic Table' of proteins helps make sense of structure

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.