Most drugs work by docking with a protein molecule, and they have to fit the cranny they enter quite precisely.
We take a protein, and a small molecule, and the small molecule binds with the protein and changes the activity of the protein.
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.
This makes sense: biologics are notoriously tricky to manufacture, and both their safety and efficacy depends not only on the specific protein sequence of the molecule, but on the highly specific culture conditions used to manufacture it.
When the proper gene is turned on and its protein is being produced, this molecule will luminesce.
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Researchers got excited about HDL in the late 1990s because they found a way to raise it by blocking a molecule called cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP).
But before a gene can make a protein, it must be transcribed onto a molecule called RNA. Researchers at Santa Clara, Calif.
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.
Both work by inhibiting an obscure molecule called the cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) that works indirectly to prevent HDL from being used to create low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the bad cholesterol.
Perjeta is a genetically engineered molecule that targets the HER-2 protein, the same protein targeted by the drug Herceptin.
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And if sense and antisense should meet, the resulting double-stranded molecule no longer works, so the protein the sense strand encodes is not made any more.
During transcription, this molecule encodes and carries information from genes to sites of protein synthesis.
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An antibody is a protein that has been tailored to stick to just one sort of molecule.
Protein drugs like Enbrel are much more expensive to make than traditional small-molecule drugs, and Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Like Antigenics' other cancer therapies, the vaccine programs the immune system to recognize a particular molecule present in many kinds of cancer, called a heat-shock protein.
They began by finding a molecule that would carry a novel amino acid to a mammal cell's protein factories.
In the case of Oxford Nanopore's technology, the DNA molecule is fed through the hole one base at a time by a second protein, an enzyme called an exonuclease.
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It was a stretch of DNA that could be transcribed by an enzyme called polymerase into a chemically similar molecule known as RNA. The RNA acted as a messenger that was itself translated into protein molecules in sub-cellular factories called ribosomes.
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