New technology developed to build larger proteins
Category: Chemical biology
Rapidly Developing Disease-Specific Detection Methods
Antibodies in your body help fight disease by specifically targeting a viral or bacterial strain. This specificity makes antibodies useful for disease detection, but how do scientists reduce the chance of false positives and false negatives?
Controversial Mushrooms Can Be Useful After All
With a renewed interest in psilocybin — the psychedelic substance present in magic mushrooms — by the medical community, the Weng group at MIT sets up to study one of the enzymes that makes it.
How Long Do Nanoparticles Stay in the Body?
As nanotechnology is developed into drugs for human health, scientists need to study nanoparticle clearance rates from the body.
Development of Sensors for Amino Acids
Researchers develop an easy to use method to identify the chirality of the amino acids, amines and alcohols.
Detergents are for more than washing dishes
Studying membrane-bound proteins requires stabilizing their structure outside of the membrane – otherwise they fall apart. But our analytical techniques have not risen to the challenge. Sadaf et al. pushes us forward by developing novel detergents for stabilizing membrane proteins.
Edible microorganism: the food of the future?
A group from the University of Tübingen obtained single-cell proteins with circular resources and renewable energy.
More than just our genetic code: how chemical modifications affect gene expression
DNA is the instruction manual for how to produce an organism, one gene at a time. But our heart cells, liver cells, and brain cells are different, despite having the same DNA, thanks in part to the “epigenetic” modifications that control which genes are expressed.
Now slide real smooth: Using peptide coatings to prevent biofilm formation
When it comes to milk, preventing bacterial contamination on dairy equipment is key. Researchers in Israel developed a biological coating to prevent biofilm formation and keep their moo-juice fresh and clean.
Delicious diagnosis – real-time glucose analysis straight from your gut
Scientists from UCSD and Compultense University developed non-invasive tools to measure gastrointestinal distress, monitoring chemical markers in real-time.
Nanoparticle Made of DNA Degrades Cancerous HER2 Protein
DNA can be more than just the genetic code. Can four specially designed strands of DNA destroy cancer cells?
Smelling chemicals with an artificial nose
Nothing compares to a well-trained dog’s nose for smelling out faint odors. But a new artificial nose made with living cells may come close!
Finding Genes that Fit: Targeting DNA Bases
Changes in our DNA can cause a host of health issues. However, we can mitigatge a lot of those if we can identify and catalogue these changes, potentially developing novel treatments.
Manipulating actinomycetes for unusual antibiotics
Scientists genetically modify bacteria to overproduce uncommon antibiotics, revealing information on how bacteria regulate and modify its metabolites.
Fishing for bacteria with gold and DNA
What happens when you bring DNA strands, gold nanoparticles, conformation-induced color changes, and a highly-intrusive bacterium together? A field-portable, inexpensive test for the world’s greatest bacterial threats.
Using microbes to make natural products
Microbial systems can be a great way to make complicated products that are useful to humans. However, because the pathways to make these products involve multiple steps and can be very complex, sometimes it’s just too difficult for one species to accomplish on its own. But working as a team with another species of microbe can have its own problems. How can researchers decide which way is best?
Did life come from the depths of the ocean?
Amino acids were found in the Atlantis Massif, under the ocean floor. Is their non-biological synthesis the origin of life?
Ancient biochemistry—your four billion year old ribosome!
Four billion years ago the Earth cooled, cyanobacteria gave us our oxygen-rich atmosphere, and your ribosomes started synthesizing proteins!
New Insights on The Elusive Protein Sulfinylation
Proteins bear a staggering collection of small chemical modifications that have large effects on their function. This research provides an elegant method to study cysteine sulfinylation, a chemical mark that has proven to be pretty elusive.
How do our cells sense touch?
Learn about new discoveries into how plants and animals sense the world around them on a microscopic level!
The influence of one water molecule on the gas-phase structure of triglycine
Can one water molecule change the conformation of a peptide? Vibrational spectroscopy in the gas-phase is the perfect technique to answer this question.
‘Optical Tweezers’ give new insights to cancer drugs
By using a technique that allows researchers to study single molecules, scientists have gained new knowledge about how a common anti-cancer drug interacts with DNA. These findings can help explain the properties of the drug and help scientists discover novel r anti-cancer treatments with improved effectiveness.
Using Machine Learning to Discover New Fluorescent Proteins
Fluorescent proteins are incredibly useful for exploring the inside of living cells. Let’s learn about a new way to find better-performing proteins using machine learning!
IRON MUST GRAB AN ELECTRON BEFORE ENTERING THE CELL
A new fluorescent molecule can distinguish between Fe(II) and Fe(III) at the cell membrane.
A surprising answer for how cells deal with a toxic – but essential – molecule
Heme is central to many processes within cells, from breaking down food to energy to transporting oxygen from the air we breathe. Bound to proteins it’s extremely useful and versatile, but by itself it is highly reactive and toxic. So how does the body prevent heme from reacting before it is used in a cell?