Rather than develop its own drugs, GlycoFi has come up with a process that can make better drugs more efficiently by controlling the sugar structure around proteins in drugs.
It would bring biologists a step closer to being able to predict the final folded structure of proteins, which would help in working out their functions and thus make it easier to design drugs that are aimed at a particular protein.
Ideally, when finding a drug, scientists start with a crystal structure of receptor proteins found on the surfaces of cells.
You would, therefore, have expected that macroscopic differences between species are reflected in differences between the molecular structure of these proteins, but this is not so.
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.
But the Merck-bound scientist's main interest has been in the structure and function of proteins, the building blocks of all living things and the basis for most drugs.
Hajduch and his colleagues in Ukraine conducted a proteomic study (examining the structure and function of proteins) of the plants and found that the seeds harvested inside the exclusion zone compared favorably with ones grown in non-contaminated soil outside.
As a part of Guillemin's team Fujino was made a distinguished alumnus of the University of Texas for discovering that one of these key proteins, LHRH (luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone), consisted of two loosely linked proteins, a new type of structure.
The researchers in this study examined the geometric structure and behaviour of one of the rotavirus's surface proteins, called VP4, which plays a key role in binding on to the surface of a target cell, and breaking through its membrane.
It comes down to about 265-350 genes and the way they work together to build proteins and the other chemicals that form the organism's structure, metabolism and self-repair mechanisms could help us to fill in some major gaps in our biological knowledge.
San Diego is Pfizer's center for structure-based drug design, which uses computers to map disease-causing proteins and suggests ways to thwart them.
Both genes help in building and transporting proteins and making sure they're in the right place in cell structure -- a process called RNA processing.
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