gear Push settings
From the common cold to pneumonia and potentially life threatening lung diseases: a single protein was found to play a key role. Now, an international team of researchers has finally zeroed in it. The key protein is called MUC5B – it is one of the two proteins found in the mucus that normally and helpfully […]
As much as we here at ZME Science love promoting science, we really hate it when the media misinterprets research and spreads false information. This time, everybody seems to be picking up the idea that 16% of the Finnish population is genetically HIV resistant. Here, we’re gonna discuss that study and why this isn’t really […]
To fully understand the processes and mechanisms that work at a cellular level, biologists should study them in their native, watery environments. But how would you go on doing this? Well, leave it to engineers to solve everyone’s problems – they have now deviced a kind of atomic force microscopy that works on samples sitting […]
Most of the time, when you’re sick, you want to deliver drugs and imaging agents to diseased cells or tumours where they’re needed most – that’s a problem researchers have solved quite a while ago, we can get particles pretty much wherever we want to. The thing is, most of the time, these agents are […]
Scientists at MIT have created tiny, millimeter-scale robots inspired by proteins that join together and can fold into various shapes. Though the research is still in its incipient form, these tiny robots could pave the way for the first real-life Transformers. Appropriately called milli-moteins, the robots can’t shape into complex shapes like a car or spaceship. Actually, […]
Culturing mammalian cells is currently the only way to make some complex proteins used in certain drugs; but growing such cultures is an extremely difficult and delicate job, because they can harbor human pathogens and must therefore be kept under strict temperature conditions. It’s a difficult job, but it’s definitely worth it; take a look […]
Be it a bacteria or a fully complex being, say a human, all living, biological organisms undergo lighting fast protein structure reassembly in response to environmnetal stimuli. For instance, receptor proteins in the sinus are stimulated by various odor molecules, basically telling the organism that there’s food nearby or it’s in the vicinity of danger (sulphur, methane, […]
Scientists from the University of Washington have been struggling for the past decade to decipher the complex structure of an enzyme that exhibits behavior similar to that of an enzyme key in the development of AIDS from an HIV infection, and which might hold a critical role in building a cure for the disease. Gamers […]
The fight against Alzheimer’s is a harsh and rugged one, and despite numerous advancements, there still isn’t a definitive cure for the disease around – or a fail proof way to detect it in the early stages.. Still, if you can’t defeat it, it’s still better to slow it down a little, and that’s exactly […]
The latest in a long line of studies conducted on the fruit fly showed that organs have the molecular mechanisms to control their proportions, a process in which a protein called p53 plays the crucial role. The study was conducted by researchers at IRB Barcelona headed by ICREA Professor Marco Milán and will be published […]
Researchers from the Scripps Research Institute have determined for the first time that prions, which are just bits of infectious protein without any DNA or RNA that can cause fatal degenerative diseases are capable of Darwinian evolution. This study shows that prions do develop significant large numbers of mutations at a protein level as a […]
The war on cancer is more intense than ever, and it’s taking place on many, many fronts. We’ve seen the anticancer minisubmarine, the anticancer trojan horse, and even the anticancer beer. In a study published in the first issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Canadian researchers showed there is yet another way to tackle cancer: re-engineering […]
Scientists that analyzed meteorite dust made some discoveries that gave them clues about the ever standing mystery of how life works at its most basic, molecular level. This question has puzzled researchers for quite a while now and definitive answers are yet to be found. “We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, […]
This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry has been earned by three scientists who researched into the mysterious green glow of a jellyfish. They will split the prize which has been given to them for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein GFP. Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; […]
