Comments on: What’s in the Vault?

By: Most popular posts, continued…

Most popular posts, continued… — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:02:01 +0000

[...] it popular? (Actually, I’m baffled by the second part of the question.) And the answer is… What’s in the Vault?, popular via StumbleUpon. It’s about a minor mystery in molecular biology. [...]

By: Timothy

Timothy — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:14:28 +0000

I am working on vaults for my undergraduate research. I (along with several other scientists) am trying to take advangage of the vault’s encapsulation ablilities to deliver theriputic compounds to specific tissues. Hopefully the vault will be used as a drug container in novel therapies.

By: Dirk Diggler

Dirk Diggler — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:33:54 +0000

Any relation to chaperonins, perhaps? Even after graduating with a strong BS in Biology, I am still disenfranchised to learn how little we know about what we believe and teach. Mitochondria may be the powerhouse, ATP may be the fuel, but we still don’t know why or how. Even astrioles, cytomeres, and their interactions with the cytoskeleton and microtubule pathways are hardly understood. While we constantly make progress, our certainty in our uncertainty is often disheartening and disinspiriring (<- I am coining that term. Fornicate the spellcheck).

By: Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:38:22 +0000

@ Christine — Thanks for mentioning Folding@home, which is helping protein scientists understand the process of folding. I’d like to mention another program, Rosetta@home, that is helping protein scientists and engineers predict and design protein folds. It runs the same way, on software that makes it easy to switch among @home projects. The approaches are very different. Folding@home follows the dynamics of a protein chain as it folds, while Rosetta@home compares alternative results (not the process) of folding one chain in many alternative ways. For fold prediction and design, this is enormously more effective. I’ve contributed quite a bit of my own machine time. It contributes to knowledge that is directly applicable to promising approaches for engineering atomically precise nanosystems. The Baker lab is behind this project, and they are arguable the leading group in the area.

By: Natovr

Natovr — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:40:57 +0000

Heh, maybe God’s just showing off a bit :D

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:43:59 +0000

There’s a program called Folding at Home and it helps universities use your computer and many others instead of a super computer to help undertsand folding proteins at a faster rate. Look it up, I think it has a lot to do with this sort of stuff. There’s no harm in using the program, just turn it on when your not using your computer.

By: Stephen Bauer

Stephen Bauer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:35:10 +0000

hello,
i am stephen Bauer at shaker junior high. I am researching you for my project and wanted to know if you could help me out with getting some information.
thank you,
Stephen Bauer

By: Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:26:25 +0000

@ Don -- A mutation or two would be enough to halt vault production, so they must have an ongoing function in cells, yet to quote from the recent Science paper, “the cellular function remains unclear”. From what I’ve read elsewhere, studying them wasn’t fashionable until relatively recently, with the discovery of a nebulous link to the resistance of some cancer cells to cytotoxic drugs. @ Michael -- A recent afterword (though under a different label) is in Engines 2.0, an e-book linked near the top of this page at E-drexler.com. I’ve been intending to write something similar and post it with the html version.