A new potential drug target has been identified in SARS CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—by scientists at the Center of Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases, or CSGID, who say multiple drugs will be needed to ...
Mar 20, 2020
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Anxiety disorders are severe mental disorders in which patients suffer from intense fears and anxiety or from sudden, inexplicable panic attacks. In extreme cases, the affected individuals barely leave their homes, which ...
Dec 28, 2018
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An antibody first identified in a blood sample from a patient who recovered from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003 inhibits related coronaviruses, including the cause of COVID-19.
May 18, 2020
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Researchers at National Jewish Health have identified an elusive trigger of type 1 diabetes. A protein fragment formed in the pancreas activates the immune system's T cells, leading them to attack and destroy beta cells, ...
Apr 9, 2019
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Redness, swelling and pain are signs of inflammation. It serves to protect the body from pathogens and foreign substances. Researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne were able to show that inflammatory reactions ...
May 16, 2022
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(Medical Xpress) -- A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how scientists have used a mathematical tool to possibly identify an Achilles heel in HIV which may lead to new vaccines ...
Billions of years ago, as primitive lifeforms were becoming more complex, a selfish genetic component became a sort of genome colonizer. Using a copy-and-paste mechanism, this pernicious bit of code replicated and inserted ...
Dec 26, 2023
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As people get older, their neural stem cells lose the ability to proliferate and produce new neurons, leading to a decline in memory function. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now discovered a mechanism linked ...
Feb 24, 2021
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New findings provide a better understanding of how the synthesis of dopamine is regulated in the brain. It may shed new light on the mechanism behind diseases such as Parkinson's.
Jan 12, 2022
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T cells play a huge role in our immune system's fight against modified cells in the body that can develop into cancer. Phagocytes and B cells identify changes in these cells and activate the T cells, which then start a full-blown ...
Jan 31, 2020
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Proteins are an important class of biological macromolecules present in all biological organisms, made up of such elements as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulphur. All proteins are polymers of amino acids. The polymers, also known as polypeptides, consist of a sequence of 20 different L-α-amino acids, also referred to as residues. For chains under 40 residues the term peptide is frequently used instead of protein. To be able to perform their biological function, proteins fold into one, or more, specific spatial conformations, driven by a number of noncovalent interactions such as hydrogen bonding, ionic interactions, Van Der Waals forces and hydrophobic packing. In order to understand the functions of proteins at a molecular level, it is often necessary to determine the three dimensional structure of proteins. This is the topic of the scientific field of structural biology, that employs techniques such as X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy, to determine the structure of proteins.
A number of residues are necessary to perform a particular biochemical function, and around 40-50 residues appears to be the lower limit for a functional domain size. Protein sizes range from this lower limit to several thousand residues in multi-functional or structural proteins. However, the current estimate for the average protein length is around 300 residues. Very large aggregates can be formed from protein subunits, for example many thousand actin molecules assemble into a microfilament.
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