filament in Biological News

MIT: Novel needle could cut medical complications

... from the oil industry. It involves a hollow S-shaped needle containing a filament that acts as a guide wire. When a physician pushes the device against a ... to the combined buckling and interactions with the walls of the tube, the filament locks into place "and the needle and wire advance as a single unit," said ...

Natural compound in broccoli could treat devastating genetic skin disorder

... keratin 14 (K14). These proteins co-polymerize to form the intermediate filament cytoskeleton in basal keratinocytes. Since the discovery in 1991 that EBS ... of tissues have been traced to defects in genes that encode intermediate filament proteins. Coulombe and colleagues turned to sulforaphane in their ...

Building memories with actin

... adenosine, a naturally occurring signal that squelches LTP. Adenosine prevents phosphorylation and inactivation of cofilin, an inhibitor of actin filament assembly, the team found. Cofilin's involvement, in turn, implicates signaling cascades headed by GTPases, such as the RhoA-ROCK and Rac-PAK ....

Muscle atrophy through thick but not thin

... that MuRF1 targets the thick filament, demolishing various components in a specific order. The researchers hypothesize that removal of certain thick filament components first permits subsequent MuRF1 access to the myosin heavy chain. However, MuRF1 doesn't exert the same power over the thin filament, which ...

Study may aid efforts to prevent uncontrolled cell division in cancer

... by successive rounds of cell division. The division of one cell into two is accomplished by the contractile ring, which is assembled from two protein filament types also used in muscle. During cell division, the genome is replicated and the two copies are separated to opposite sides of the cell. A ...

Cheap and efficient white light LEDs new design described in AIP's Journal of Applied Physics

... friendly and much more efficient than other types of light bulbs. Incandescent bulbs produce light by sending electricity through a thin metal filament that glows red hot. Only about five percent of the energy is turned into light, however. The rest is wasted as heat. Compact fluorescent bulbs, which ...

A budding role for a cellular dynamo

... new study in the current issue of Developmental Cell , Brandeis researchers raise the curtain on how this actin maintains just the right filament length to keep the cell healthy and happily dividing. Using baker's yeast as the model organism, Brandeis researchers Melissa Chesarone, ...

Human DNA repair process recorded in action

... action whenever it occurs. Rad51 takes a leading role in the action. Always on call in the cell, molecules of the protein assemble into a long filament along a damaged or broken segment of DNA, where they help stretch out the coiled strands and align them with corresponding segments on the cell's ...

Lamin A/C deficiency is 'unnerving'

... Mutations in the nuclear intermediate filament lamin A/C (LMNA) gene are associated with Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy, but cause the disease by unknown mechanisms. Mjat et al. show that one ...

University of Arizona scientist shares in discovery of microbe filaments' power

... to pull is one of the strongest nanomotors known in biology, So said. In previous studies, the same group of investigators measured single filament retraction forces in the 50 to 100 picoNewton range. This force allows the bacterium to move an object 10,000 times its own body weight. Retraction ...

Media highlights in the Dec. 15 issue of Biophysical Journal

... is still not fully revealed because of its complex nature involving binding of both Ca2+ and myosin (a linear force-generating motor) to actin filament (the track protein). In this work the authors approached the mechanism of regulation by myosin molecules from a new angle. The idea was to test the ...

Speed plays crucial role in breaking protein's H-bonds

... Buehlers lab at MIT, set up a six-month computer simulation study. They worked with two different types of common proteins: vimentinan alpha-helical filament protein that plays an important role in cellular signaling and stabilityand amyloidal fibrilsbeta-folded proteins. These protein motifs form the ...

UNC nanotech spin-off forms new venture with Siemens

... screeners. They could enter the field of medical diagnostics within a few years. X-ray technology has many limitations: it requires heating a filament to 1,000 degrees in order to produce the electrons that make an X-ray image; it requires large and bulky equipment; and its slow. Early CT ...

Recombination protein dynamics observed with single monomer resolution

... process, RecA binds with DNA to form a filament that spirals around the DNA. The filament can grow in either direction, and can advance on ... of how RecA nucleates to form a filament, how the filament changes shape, and how ...

A new focus for the mechanism of nerve growth

... depends on the coordinated assembly of actin filament networks. This study implicates the molecular ... or FSM, that let them directly see actin filament assembly, disassembly and movement in living ... role in growth cone guidance -- suggesting actin filament recycling and signaling may be intimately ....

Marathon of nano-sprinters

... a single molecular motor can only 'grab' onto the filament for a relatively short time, on the order of one ... shown in Fig.1, any motor that unbinds from the filament will stay close to that filament as long as the cargo ...

Motor transport in bio-nano systems

... traffic for different compartment geometries and filament arrangements, and have determined the optimal ... a jam, the molecular motors can unbind from the filament and, thus, escape into the third dimension. In ... to a large extent, provided the motors leave the filament sufficiently fast after they have reached its ...

DNA Recombination and Repair—A New Twist to RecA Function

... can be mended. But how RecA molecules within a filament coordinate and organize their activities to carry ... with DNA. Previous experiments have shown that filament assembly spreads rapidly in the 5'-to-3' ... RecA molecule to burn one ATP. This implies a filament organization in which every RecA molecule ...

New insight into machinery of immune cells' 'tentacles'

... actin into filaments following activation of the T cells. Such actin filament formation is crucial for the T cell to attach to APCs, called B cells, ... the researchers found that both Abi and Wave homed in on sites of actin filament formation. What's more, when the scientists activated T cells with a ...

Scientists use gene transfer technology and common virus to block neuropathic pain

... as a painful sensation. Rats with neuropathy will lift their paw if the filament or heat produces pain. Rats without neuropathic pain don't even notice. By ... the transgene vector had significantly lower pain threshold responses to filament touch and heat exposure tests than rats that did not receive the vector. ...

Scientists use gene transfer technology and common virus to block neuropathic pain in animals

... as a painful sensation. Rats with neuropathy will lift their paw if the filament or heat produces pain. Rats without neuropathic pain don't even notice. By ... the transgene vector had significantly lower pain threshold responses to filament touch and heat exposure tests than rats that did not receive the vector. ...

Spiders help scientists discover how muscles relax

... filaments. The heads of these myosin rods project outward from the thick filament to connect with and move actin filaments during contraction of a muscle. ... time that the structure of the backbone has been clearly seen in any thick filament reconstruction," the researchers wrote. "The structure reveals how the ...

Open microfluidic and nanofluidic systems

... matches the channel geometry with the substrate wettability. Thus, a water filament in a narrow channel that has a width of 100 nanometer can sustain an ... atm. In contrast, if the channel had a width of one millimeter, the water filament could only sustain a thousandth part of an atmosphere. One relatively ...

MIT engineers probe spiders' polymer art

... metal plates. The magic that makes silk so strong, the researchers discovered, happens while it flows out of the spider's gland, lengthens into a filament and dries. Engineering Nature The key to spider silk is polymers. Plastics, Kevlar (used in bulletproof vests) and parts of the ...

Movement of chromosome in nucleus visualized

... slowed. Introducing a mutant actin that does not form filaments stopped the movement, while the introduction of an actin mutant that enhances filament formation accelerated the movement. In addition, when a drug that inhibits actin/myosin interactions was added to the cells, the chromosome movement ...

Master genetic switch found for chronic pain

... pain response by subjecting the animals' hindpaw to either the cold of acetone or an uncomfortably warm plate (thermal); the uncomfortable prick of a filament (mechanical); an injection of an inflammation-inducing chemical (inflammatory); or nerve damage (neuropathic). They quantified the animals' response ...

Marine sponge yields nanoscale secrets

... other high-tech applications. Morse explained that his research group discovered that the center of the sponge's fine glass needles contains a filament of protein that controls the synthesis of the needles. By cloning and sequencing the DNA of the gene that codes for this protein, they found that the ...

Scientists discover that host cell lipids facilitate bacterial movement

... involved in regulating actin assembly. PIP2 and PIP3 also prevent capping proteins from binding to the ends of actin filaments, allowing new actin filament assembly. Because Listeria is capable of stimulating actin assembly and PIP2 and PIP3 are known to localize to regions of new actin assembly, Dr. ...

Plants, animals share molecular growth mechanisms

... Results of the study are published in the February issue of the journal The Plant Cell. "Perhaps by learning about this pathway for actin filament formation, we can engineer plant cells to grow in different ways or alter how cells respond to external stimuli so they can defend themselves against ...