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Tag: "amino" at biology news

Researchers discover new form of cancer gene regulation

... the cellular machinery makes a protein by linking amino acids together according to the plan described in the messenger RNA and thereby based on the information from the DNA sequence of the gene. Iannaccone and colleagues showed that after the messenger RNA for GLI1 is made, it binds to the Quaking pro...

Scientists show how thinking can harm brain cells

...n neurodegenerative disease has been glutamate, an amino acid that normally acts as a neurotransmitter. Excess glutamate, however, can overly excite neurons, causing damage and death ?a process called excitotoxicity. Some drugs developed for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, for example, are designed t...

'Computer-chemistry' yields new insight into a puzzle of cell division

...o remove the phosphates from two phosphate-bearing amino acids on the protein. Those removals alter electrical charges in a way that allows the protein to pick up other phosphate-containing chemical groups to pass along as part of a molecular bucket brigade. Rudolph initially knew the kinase's and phosph...

A salty tale: New bacterial genome sequenced from ancient salterns

...t S. ruber's proteins are typically rich in acidic amino acids and relatively poor in hydrophobic (water-repellent) amino acids, making them soluble and highly stable at such salt concentrations. Researchers recognized thi...

Feeling old?

...e age breakdown starts to win. However, adding the amino acid leucine to the diet of old individuals can se... triggered by the arrival of a plentiful supply of amino acids. In older animals this stimulus is less effective; synthesis slows down, and previous work als...

Scientists develop protein-sequence analysis tool

...of groups of related proteins and flags individual amino acid positions that are likely to control function...re two related groups of proteins differ either in amino acid identity or in a property such as charge or polarity. "Experience tells us that such positions...

Intelligently designed molecular evolution

...roteins can be altered with just a small number of amino acid substitutions, a property known as plasticity...em works. Multiple combinations of many different amino acid substitutions are tested in promiscuous enzymes until an evolutionary path that achieves a desi...

Researchers map of genetic variations implicated in disease

...ecent past." The study further described over 300 amino acid changing variants in gene sequences. These variants are strong candidates for functional studies to understand the role of variation in MHC-associated disease. Autoimmune disease affects about 3 million people in the UK. The three haplotypes st...

MIT chemist discovers secret behind nature's medicines

...udy. Normally, iron-containing enzymes have three amino acids that hold the iron in the active site. In this enzyme, however, one of the typical amino acids was substituted with a much shorter one. That smaller substitute leaves more room in the acti...

Tastier tomatoes in the future?

... to quickly and simultaneously look into a fruit's amino acids, organic acids, sugar and vitamins. Dr. Ali... one hand, we measured higher amounts of essential amino acids and vitamins, on the other hand the fruits showed an altered combination of various sugars and...

UW-Madison engineers squeeze secrets from proteins

... proteins form or "fold" from sequenced strings of amino acids has long been one of the grand challenges of biology. A common belief holds that the more proteins are confined by their environment, the more stable - or less likely to unfold - they become. Now, as reported on the cover of the March issue o...

Protein translation in sperm

...at, bovine and mouse sperm all incorporate labeled amino acids into polypeptides during the capacitation phase. They identify that mitochondrial translation machinery (as opposed to cytoplasmic) directs translation of nuclear-encoded genes in sperm, and that its inhibition leads to a marked decrease in spe...

Rutgers researchers find fat gene

...an said. The group worked out the sequence of the amino acids that make up the PAP enzyme, allowing them to backtrack along the path to its origin ?the gene that coded it ?linking the enzyme to the yeast gene PAH1 that made it. Carman and his group went on to confirm the link by introducing the yeast gene...

Sea coral's trick helps scientists tag proteins

... the sequence for Dendra and an accompanying short amino acid tail can be inserted into the gene encoding the protein a scientist wants to study. In living cells, the fluorescent tail is produced along with the protein, acting like a beacon to researchers who want to learn what the main protein does and wh...

Protein 'nanosprings' most resilient found in nature

...yrin repeats consist of tandem modules of about 33 amino acids, the researchers said. Found in a large numb...ctures, characterized by a single, spiral chain of amino acids stabilized by hydrogen bonds. "We live in a world of forces," Bennett continued. "For example...

Hantavirus found in African wood mouse

...5 percent of its nucleotides and 85 percent of its amino acids with Asian and European hantaviruses. "Those observed differences are large enough to allow its classification as a novel hantavirus," said ter Meulen. The new virus appears most closely related to the Dobrava virus, originally discovered in Sl...

Common enzyme is a key player in DNA repair

...rchers also discovered that a single change in the amino acids that make up DinB will strip it of its unique talent and change it into an ordinary polymerase. When a protein is that easy to modify, scientists assume its function must be important to have survived several billion years of evolution. "In g...

Scientists develop a way to make the deadliest toxin known even more toxic

...breaking up proteins into smaller elements such as amino acids and reducing the amount of energy needed for the activation. The study was released in an advanced online version by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Kim Janda, currently the Ely R. Callaway Jr. professor of chemistry, director...

Cracking the genetic code for control of gene expression

... Based on the universal code by which DNA encodes amino acids, we can make sense of the constantly increasing amout of DNA sequence data as far as it encodes proteins. This code was solved in 1966 and it has allowed researchers to find new genes and estimate the total number of genes in the human genome. ...

The giant protein titin helps build muscles

...rotein titin, which possesses tens of thousands of amino acids in some isoforms. "There are probably hundreds or even thousands of more interactions down the road. We have found one of the first and eagerly anticipate discovering many others, probably coming with lots of surprises," Wilmanns concludes. "We...

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