With the help of Chiara Cirelli, who also works at the University of Wisconsin, Dr Tononi has created a mutant fruit fly that sleeps only two or three hours a night. (A normal fly sleeps between eight and 14 hours.) The mutation itself is in a gene for a nerve-cell protein of a type known as an ion channel.
The ribosome is the structure within the cell where protein synthesis takes place.
Castrated rats treated with testosterone had significantly reduced heart damage and near-control stem cell and protein levels, the study found.
Kopito, a biologist at Stanford University, recently showed that clumps of the Huntington's protein can clog the cell's waste disposal system.
Using such fusion proteins, a scientist can follow exactly where a protein moves in a cell, or in an animal's body.
So Vertex and the CFF worked to develop drugs that would raise the protein out of the cell so Kalydeco could work.
FORBES: Personalized Cystic Fibrosis Drugs Get A Booster Shot
So the idea is to use a second pill to get the CFTR protein up to the cell surface so Kalydeco can work.
FORBES: The Best Argument That Vertex's CF Drug Combination Works
Changes in this gene, which codes for a protein that facilitates nerve cell communication, have been linked to autism in various studies.
Only if all five are found at the right levels does the circuit activate, producing a protein that causes the cell to destroy itself.
The patients who had the stem cell marker protein Lamin A present in their tissue were more likely to have an aggressive form of the disease.
They began by finding a molecule that would carry a novel amino acid to a mammal cell's protein factories.
The scientists found that a cell-signaling protein, or cytokine, known as a hippocampal TNF (tumor necrosis factor) played a limited role.
ALS6 is a protein normally found inside a cell's nucleus, but in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, it is found outside the nucleus and sometimes forms unusual clumps.
CNN: Gene linked to some cases of Lou Gehrig's disease found
These work by binding chemically to that enzyme's active site to inhibit its action. (Protease cuts the raw chain of virus protein produced by a subverted cell into functional molecules.) However, the mechanism is not quite identical.
Ricin interferes with the process of protein synthesis, eventually leading to cell death.
Children with the disease have a genetic mutation that causes them to produce the protein progerin, which blocks normal cell function.
Scientists have for the first time created laser light using living biological material: a single human cell and some jellyfish protein.
Take, for example, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University who developed a solar cell using the photosynthetic protein found in spinach.
The message itself is copied into a single-stranded messenger molecule which carries it to the protein-making parts of the cell, where it is translated.
The physical manifestations of the disease that Alois Alzheimer noticed in 1906 are sticky plaques of one type of protein, now known as beta-amyloid, and nerve-cell-engulfing tangles of a second type, called tau protein.
These latch on to a protein that is expressed often in cancer cell but not in normal ones.
FORBES: Seattle Genetics Scores Win For Smart-Bomb Cancer Drugs
They also found hints that genes whose protein-products work together in a cell have sometimes ended up as neighbours on a chromosome.
ECONOMIST: The ��book of life�� may be missing half of its words
That protein is a switch that tells a cell to self-destruct.
This technology, which Dow AgroSciences is moving toward the market, is called a zinc finger, a naturally occurring protein that can be used in a cell nucleus like an editor's red pencil.
This is an artificial molecule that binds to and disables the molecular messengers a gene sends out into the cell it inhabits, to tell that cell how to make the protein that the gene encodes.
They are, in effect, internal viruses unable to leave a cell because they lack the protein coats that allow real viruses to survive in the outside world and attach themselves to new host cells, but contributing nothing to the welfare of the cells they inhabit.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
They do this by interfering with the activity of the messenger RNA strands that transfer genetic information from the cell's nucleus to its protein-making machinery.
When a cell translates a gene into a protein, it uses a messenger molecule that carries the genetic information to a protein factory called a ribosome.
应用推荐