Enlarge (credit: Justin Lewis) Medical authorities have spent years convincing people to use sunscreen to limit their exposure to UV light. But that effort has had a bit of a setback, as several locations have recently banned the use of sunblocks by beachgoers. Those bans took effect after local waters were found to have high […]
Enlarge / The three-dimensional structures of proteins provide many opportunities for specific interactions. (credit: Getty Images) Thanks in part to the large range of shapes they can adopt and the chemical environments those shapes create, proteins can perform an amazing number of functions. But there are many proteins we wish didn’t function quite so well, […]
Enlarge / Top row: the hallucination and actual structure. Bottom row: the two structures superimposed. (credit: Anishchenko et. al.) Chemically, proteins are just a long string of amino acids. Their amazing properties come about because that chain can fold up into a complex, three-dimensional shape. So understanding the rules that govern this folding can not […]
Enlarge / Herpes viruses getting ready to infect new cells. (credit: Thierry Work, USGS ) One of the defining features of viruses is that they rely on host proteins in order to reproduce. A host cell will often copy viral genes into RNAs and then translate those RNAs into proteins, for example. Typically, a mature […]
Enlarge / A technician performs rapid tests for malaria in Thailand. (credit: Thierry Falise / Getty Images ) The pandemic has introduced a lot of people to the idea of rapid antigen tests, which can quickly and conveniently reveal the presence of an infection. But in many parts of the world, rapid tests are a […]
Enlarge / The left- and right-handed forms of an amino acid. Every living thing uses the left-handed form exclusively. (credit: Wikimedia Commons) The central dogma of molecular biology holds that DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which then gets translated into proteins. Of course, there are exceptions—some viruses, like coronaviruses, forego DNA altogether and encode their […]
Enlarge (credit: Sloan-Kettering) Just one week after Google’s DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure—a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In […]
Enlarge (credit: University of Washington ) Thanks to the development of DNA-sequencing technology, it has become trivial to obtain the sequence of bases that encode a protein and translate that to the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. But from there, we often end up stuck. The actual function of the protein […]
Enlarge / Normal DNA uses adenine (left), while some viruses use diaminopurine instead. DNA is the genetic material used by every living organism. But, in a few edge cases, the four bases of DNA—adenine, thymidine, cytosine, and guanine—undergo chemical modifications. And in viruses, things are far more flexible, with many using RNA instead of DNA […]
Scientists have shown how a new class of Turing patterns work by using synthetic biology to create them from scratch in the lab. Shortly before his death, Alan Turing published a provocative paper outlining his theory for how complex, irregular patterns emerge in nature—his version of how the leopard got its spots. These so-called Turing […]