Posts tagged as:

molecular biology

Autophagy:
Why you should eat yourself

July 24, 2010

I’d like to say a few words about one of the hottest and, in my view, most important areas in biomedicine: autophagy, a process crucial to health, disease, and aging. Autophagy research is expanding rapidly.
In autophagy (“self eating”), cells engulf and digest their own macromolecules and organelles. Autophagy serves two functions: providing critical nutrients in [...]

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Learning Bioinformatics

March 12, 2010

Bioinformatics is huge, growing, fast, and has a surprising range of applications to molecular systems engineering. Here’s a PLoS article: “A Quick Guide for Developing Effective Bioinformatics Programming Skills”. From the abstract:
Successful adoption of these principals will serve both beginner and experienced bioinformaticians alike in career development and pursuit of professional and scientific goals.

[...]

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Molecular Electron Holography:
Progress toward atomic-resolution imaging?

October 20, 2009

Hans-Werner Fink’s group reports a remarkable advance in imaging individual biomolecules, with surprising physics, and (to me, at least) a somewhat mysterious date of publication.
The surprise is that it doesn’t destroy the molecules before imaging them.
The new generation of aberration-corrected electron microscopes achieve atomic resolution, but with a caveat — they succeed with robust, inorganic [...]

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Productive Nanosystems: The Ribosome Videos

July 16, 2009

While browsing the literature on the catalysis of bond formation in protein synthesis by ribosomes*, I came across a wonderful set of videos of the ribosomal protein manufacturing system at work, shown in recent-state-of-the-art molecular detail. These videos were presented in a Chemical & Engineering News article online, but I missed seeing them at the [...]

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Machines Evolving to the Brink of Failure

April 30, 2009

While writing a post on molecular engineering for the Macromolecular Modeling Blog, I came across an EMBO Reports paper that provided new guidelines for protein engineering; It also illustrates a general principle that should be taken to heart by anyone thinking about molecular engineering from a biomolecular perspective:
Molecular machines tend to evolve toward the [...]

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Macromolecular Modeling
for Molecular Systems Engineering

April 16, 2009

Nir London of the Macromolecular Modeling Blog has invited me to offer my perspective on the field. After patiently waiting for me to complete it, he’s posted the resulting essay, which I have cross-posted below.
The Macromolecular Modeling Blog is hosted by the Rosetta Design Group, which offers molecular modeling services based on the Rosetta protein [...]

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A High-Performance Polymer
for Nanosytems Engineering

March 19, 2009

Molecular objects made of a nylon-like, high-performance polymer are among the most impressive nanostructures in existence today, and I expect structures like these to be used in developing advanced, atomically precise nanotechnologies in the coming years. This high-performance polymer is really more of a construction kit: Its monomeric parts can be hooked up to make [...]

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What’s in the Vault?

February 22, 2009

They’re called “vaults”. They‘re in our cells, and in those of every* plant, animal, and fungus. Like ribosomes, they’re atomically precise self-assembled structures made of protein and RNA, but they’re big and hollow, large enough to pack many ribosomes inside. They’re relatively simple and symmetric: A vault consists of two identical halves, each consisting almost [...]

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Productive Nanosystems: The Movies

January 30, 2009

In his comment on Molecular Machine Assembly: The Movie, Drew Whitehouse reminded me of a set of excellent animations of biological productive nanosystems, work done by Drew Berry. These videos are based on scientific data describing molecular structure and function, and from what I’ve seen, Drew Berry’s work is the best of its kind. Below [...]

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Molecular Assembly Lines

January 5, 2009

Cells use what are, in effect, molecular assembly lines to manufacture a range of complex molecular products. Biochemists recently learned in greater detail how these biomolecular assembly lines work, and are considering how to string devices together to make artificial machines that work the same way.

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