Molecular biology – Page 3
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Opinion
Nobel vision
Looking beyond the here-and-now let click chemistry open up a whole new world of possibility
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Opinion
Cracking codons
Understanding how chemistry links RNA triplets to the properties of amino acids
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Opinion
Why AlphaFold won’t revolutionise drug discovery
Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain
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Research
Teixobactin’s two pronged antibiotic attack mechanism revealed
Understanding of formation of deadly supramolecular structures could help build improved antimicrobials
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Research
Mystery of how plants make strychnine solved 75 years after characterisation
Three-quarters of a century after Robinson and Woodward cracked structure chemists unravel poison’s biosynthesis
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Research
Fossil molecules reveal dinosaurs’ bird-like metabolism
Thioethers preserved in bones show that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded, though T rex may have been particularly sluggish
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News
Chemistry Nobel laureate Sidney Altman dies at 82
Canadian–American molecular biologist won the 1989 prize for discovering RNA’s catalytic ability
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Article
Causal emergence might explain how living systems can operate
Life does not run like clockwork
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Feature
Sequencing one cell at a time
New advances that allow scientists to uncover the molecular differences between individual cells could revolutionise medicine, Ian le Guillou finds
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Research
Biochemical secrets of tarantula’s painful bite could point to perfect painkillers
King baboon spider venom could help scientists develop potent analgesics
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Research
New microscope makes tracking chiral molecules in live cells possible
The instrument uses circularly polarised light to tell left- and right-handed species apart and monitor them in space and time
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Research
Left-handed nanoparticles are far better vaccine adjuvants than their mirror images
Chiral gold nanoparticles shown for the first time to elicit differing immune responses in cells and live mice
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Research
Gel-forming proteins could help tardigrades survive extreme conditions
Biophysical dissection of tardigrade’s disordered protein could uncover how microscopic animals survive conditions that kill most other forms of life
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Research
Individual proteins identified with world’s tiniest ruler
Nanosized caliper that can identify individual proteins could ‘do for proteins what next-generation sequencing did for DNA’
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Research
Possible dinosaur DNA discovered in 125-million-year-old fossil
But that doesn’t mean we can clone extinct species Jurassic Park-style
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Research
Exploiting evolution to explore chemical space shows promise for drug discovery
Using molecular trees – similar to family trees – chemists could predict how products will evolve to make new molecules
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Research
DNA robot controls live cells’ movement
Molecular machine walks across cell membrane to activate cellular migration
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Business
Brewing up plant-inspired medicines
Antheia reconstructs complex biochemical pathways in yeasts to speed up production of natural product-based drugs
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Research
Mirror image enzyme constructs longest ever mirror DNA strand
Since chirally inverted DNA is more stable than its natural counterpart, it can be used to encode secret messages
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News
Machine learning delivers ‘human genome’ moment for proteins
Protein structure prediction tools AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold take the latest steps towards maturity and make their software open source