proteins

Viewing posts tagged proteins

14 Jun 2017

Institute for Protein Innovation Launched

By Jay Goth

The Institute for Protein Innovation will work to pursue new therapies for currently intractable diseases by bringing together leaders with backgrounds in academic research, the biopharma industry, and biomedical investing.

The Institute plans to curate information related to DNA sequence, protein expression, and functional validation of these reagents, including source code, in a publicly-accessible web portal, with the goal of accelerating the development of new drugs and supporting existing large-scale research efforts, citing the Human Cell Atlas.

The Institute said it will recruit researchers focused on directed evolution, cell-line development, and biophysical protein characterization, in addition to glycoprotein expression and antibody discovery expertise.

“Despite their pivotal importance in research and medicine, proteins lag behind DNA and RNA in institutional research support and funding.”

–Timothy A. Springer, Ph.D., Founder and Latham Family Professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital

Read the full article at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News here.

New Article in GEN

09 Jun 2017

Finding Brain Cancer 5 Years Early

By Jay Goth
the ohio state university logo

New research from academia


Interactions among proteins that relay information from one immune cell to another are weakened in the blood of brain cancer patients within five years before the cancer is diagnosed, said lead researcher Judith Schwartzbaum of The Ohio State University.

“this research could pave the way for techniques to identify brain cancer earlier and allow for more-effective treatment”

Read the entire article from The Ohio State University here.

27 Jan 2017

The Amazing World of Disordered Proteins

By Jay Goth

For more than a century, biologists have thought that the proteins carrying out functions like driving chemical reactions, passing signals up and down the cell’s information superhighway, or maybe hanging molecular tags onto DNA are like rigid cogs in the cell’s machinery.

From Quanta Magazine article

But according to an article in Quanta Magazine recent studies estimate that up to half of the total amino acid sequence that makes up proteins in humans doesn’t fold into a distinct shape. This fluidity — dubbed “intrinsic disorder” — endows proteins with a set of superpowers that structured proteins don’t have.

“The key now is that we need to understand how these proteins are functioning in biology,” said Peter Wright, a structural biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

See the full article here.

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