For instance, learning which microbes in the gut regulate functions such as the digestion of fat or proteins could help in the fight against obesity, researchers said.
To test the role played by key proteins, or hubs, the researchers selectively deleted proteins or genes in the organisms and observed what happened.
Most drugs work by blocking or destroying proteins, but antisense drugs instead block the genes that are recipes for them.
One of the ways functional genomics works is to use models to identify proteins or small molecules that interact with other proteins.
As patients age, genetic mutations or unknown environmental factors may boost the production of deformed proteins, or old brain cells simply may become less able to dispose of debris.
Complicating matters further, HDL contains a constantly shifting array of 50 or more associated proteins.
When a protein, or group of proteins, malfunctions, it appears to give rise to a variety of distinct illnesses.
Instead of medicines made from small, easy-to-manufacture molecules, biotech drugs were proteins or antibodies--big messy molecules of the kind found in our bodies.
The process is so labor intensive that researchers have sketched the structures of less than 2% of the 100, 000 or so human proteins.
They believe they have discovered new, telltale proteins or protein-fragment patterns.
At the time, the hot research area was in testing G-protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRS. These proteins transmit chemical signals into a wide variety of cell types.
Phosphorylation is a type of cell regulation involving the attachment to, or removal of, phosphate groups from proteins, thereby switching their biological functions on or off, or making them more or less stable.
They took these "dendritic" cells and added proteins from various types of cancer, or viruses, using a bird virus to transport the proteins into the dendritic cells.
The usual forms of processing that involve heat treatment were found to denature, or destroy, the useful proteins in the mussels.
Its research programme is equally concentrated on new, specialised applications for its existing drugs, or specific uses for new proteins, such as Crohn's disease.
To play, no previous knowledge of proteins, biochemistry or biology is required - all a user has to have is a computer and an internet connection.
That gives scientists clues as to what the function of the proteins is and whether or not they are indeed in a disease process.
These drugs, several of which are wending their way through human testing at Pfizer, Bayer, GlaxoSmithkline and other firms, are like Swiss Army knives, with molecular structures versatile enough to deactivate two, three or even four tumor-promoting proteins at once.
Pigs or indeed potatoes can produce human proteins for medical use (though none has yet received authorisation), foot-and-mouth vaccine can come from alfalfa, genes from enzyme-making bacteria can do the same job in tobacco, and useful new enzymes can be found and put into old bacteria.
But some human proteins are either too large or too complex for microbial cells to synthesize.
Prof Robert Modlin, a dermatology and microbiology expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the study raises the possibility that a decrease or increase of one of these two proteins could shift the balance from mild to more serious disease.
The new drug, known as MLN341 or PS-341, reduced levels of proteins used to monitor the disease in 77% of 78 patients.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara plan to break that silence with genetically engineered proteins that can make silicon dioxide or titanium dioxide structures like those used in the computer chips and solar cells that we hold dear.
The acid from the lime, lemon or orange juice changes the structure of the proteins in the fish much in the same way that heat does. (If you make it at home, you can observe the flesh turning from translucent to opaque.) Therein lay my answer.
Much work is left to get the proteins producing the kind of silicon or titanium dioxides that could run a computer or power your house, but the dream is to have synthetic creations that organically produce what would normally need a mining expedition -- imagine something akin to the glass-like Venus' Flower Basket sponge (pictured above) sitting in an Intel factory.
It is vitally important, because misfolded proteins either do not work at all or do things that they shouldn't.
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Also, the way that the immune system recognizes, or doesn't recognize, certain areas of proteins may play into to what extent a person can outgrow an allergy, she said.
Either the bugs would make a single genetic change to the proteins to which the macrolides bind, or the bacteria would absorb the drug but then pump it out before it could work.
The shavings were then immunostained bathed in a special reagent that would mark the presence of abnormal proteins with a bright, telltale red or brown stain on the surface of the tissue.
Bacteria learned to get around macrolides in two ways: Either they would make a single genetic change to the proteins to which the macrolides bind, or they would absorb the drug but then pump it out.
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