Adenine in Biological News

American Chemical Society Weekly PressPac -- April 8, 2009

... ricin in any sample by measuring the release of adenine from specific ricin substrates. Ricin-catalyzed adenine release from ribosomes stops protein synthesis ... of action of this deadly toxin. By coupling adenine release to light formation by firefly luciferase, ...

Stanford researchers make first direct observation of 3-D molecule folding in real time

... adenine, a gene that makes a protein crucial to adenine production stopped working correctly. The RNA ... changed shape. The riboswitch regulated how much adenine was available in the cell; when there was plenty, it shut down the adenine factory. Before scientists discovered ...

How did chemical constituents essential to life arise on primitive Earth?

... The newly proposed mechanism for the formation of adenine gives a clear picture of how it could have become ... and thymine. The UGA chemists focused on adenine because of its relative prevalence on Earth and ... Along with other fundamental building blocks, adenine has even been detected extraterrestrially. Still, ...

Einstein researchers devise a fast and sensitive way to detect ricin

... Schramm's assay detects and quantifies ricin by measuring the amount of adenine released by cells. "Our lab's expertise is in enzymes," says Dr. Schramm. "One day I realized we could use a specific enzyme to convert the adenine released by ricin into ATP─a molecule whose presence can be easily ...

Researchers find pathway and enzyme unique to tularemia organism

... tularensis makes an essential metabolic molecule, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), using a different process and different enzyme from ... human host. "There is a 'conventional' way to make NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, in all living organisms studied thus far, ranging from ...

Baylor researchers unravel mystery of DNA conformation

... by Petttitt. They found that when DNA is underwound in the same manner that you might underwind a spring, the forces induce one of two bases adenine or thymine to "flip out" of the sequence, thus relieving the stress that the molecule experiences. "It always happens in the underwound state," ...

Powe Award supports research on how enzymes enable the pathogenicity of 2 human disease organisms

... The synthesis of siderophores in M. tuberculosis and A. fumigatus requires special enzymes (hydroxylase) that are dependent on the cofactor flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD). The function of these enzymes is essential to form the hydroxamate potion of the siderophore, which binds the iron molecule. ...

A new way to assemble cells into 3-D microtissues

... of the synthetic DNA sequence. The researchers can specify the complexity for example, from a simple repeat of two bases such as cytosine and adenine ... on one strand, which binds to a complementary repeating sequence of thymine and guanine ... on the other, up to sequences whose ...

New computational technique allows comparison of whole genomes as easily as whole books

... these genomes are very large, the researchers translated the genome sequences using a reduced, two-letter alphabet - R for the purine nucleic acids, adenine and guanine, and Y for the pyrimidine nucleic acids, thymine and cytosine - to reduce the complexity of calculation. Using an optimal feature length ...

Researchers develop new self-training gene prediction program for fungi

... but the similarity of the pattern is not deterministic. Locating the branch site which is nine nucleotides in length, almost always contains an adenine and is located 20-50 bases upstream of the acceptor site helps to accurately identify an intron. An initial run of the program with a reduced ...

Researchers visualize complex pigment mixtures in living cells

... by cyclic electron transport around photosystem I, and the peripheral ones do linear electron flow resulting in ATP as well as reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate, the carrier of reducing equivalents used for carbon dioxide fixation. The bottom line here is that even if cell ...

Gene variation may elevate risk of liver tumor in patients with cirrhosis

... patients. The researchers focused on a known variation in the EGF gene the presence of the nucleotide guanine (G) instead of the more common adenine (A) in a particular location which has been shown to increase EGF secretion in blood cells and raise the risk for malignant melanoma. Individuals ...

Bacteria have their own immune system protecting against outside DNA

... is able to recognize foreign DNA on the basis of its increased content of adenine and thymine, the building blocks of DNA. "It has been a great mystery why disease-causing genes of bacteria usually contain more adenine and thymine," said Michael McClelland, professor and director of the ...

Uncovering DNA's 'sweet' secret

... the bases (rungs of the ladder) bind. The bases in normal DNA adhere to a somewhat strict binding scheme - guanine (G) binds with cytosine (C) and adenine (A) binds with thymine (T). In this "Watson-Crick" basepairing, the G:C bonds are much stronger than A:T or any other bonds. "In homo-DNA, the ...

Scientists design simple dipstick test for cocaine, other drugs

... sample solution. So far, the researchers have successfully demonstrated their dipstick technology on both adenosine (a nucleotide consisting of adenine and ribose) and cocaine, in human blood serum. "Our results show that the aptamer-based dipstick is compatible with biological samples, making ...

Precision biochemistry tracks DNA damage in fish

... with mass spectrometry (LC/MS,GC/MS). Precision chemical analysis techniques at NIST allowed the researchers to identify and measure damage to adenine and guanine, specific chemical components or bases of DNA, at extraordinarily low levels--five lesions out of a 100 million bases in one case. The ...

Study finds 60 new genes controlled by DNA snippet

... the regulatory sequence under examination was the CArG box. The nucleotide building blocks of DNA chains may contain any one of four nucleobases: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). Any sequence of code starting with 2 Cs, followed by any combination of 6 As or Ts, and ending in 2 ...

Scientists take aim at virulent bacteria by decoding machinery of key control enzyme

... Their research will be published in the May 6 issue of the journal Cell. Scientists have known for many years that an enzyme called Dam (DNA adenine methyltransferase) plays a role in regulating gene expression in many bacteria. Each time the bacteria reproduce, Dam modifies the A (adenine) ...

Second messenger NAADP shows fast, dose-related impact on satiety cycle

... drug to address this major global health problem. Enter a recently discovered and already controversial natural molecule called nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP), which is active in cells from plants to humans. NAADP is thought to be a so-called "second messenger," because it ...

An HIV Protein Plays a Surprising Role in Gene Activation

... general transcription factors to form a pre-initiation complex (PIC) on the gene's promoter, where it binds to region rich in thymine (T) and adenine (A) named the TATA box. The first transcription factor to associate with the TATA box is called TFIID, a large protein complex containing a protein ...