Scientists Discover How Protein Crucial For Motion Is Synthesized At The Right Place In The Cell

Scientists Discover How Protein Crucial For Motion Is Synthesized At The Right Place In The Cell: "A protein called ZBP1 binds to the messenger RNA and 'escorts' it out of the fibroblast nucleus and into the cytoplasm. On reaching the cell's periphery, the messenger RNA is translated into actin protein responsible for cell motility.
This new study reveals another key role for ZBP1: Not only does ZBP1 bind to actin messenger RNA and guide it to the cell's periphery, but it also helps regulate where in the cell the messenger RNA is translated into actin."

Lasers Improve Scientists' Understanding Of Complex Proteins

Lasers Improve Scientists' Understanding Of Complex Proteins: "Using a system called fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) on a single molecule, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory?s Physical Biosciences Institute (PBI) in collaboration with UCLA scientists found that the procedure that regulates genes in a strand of DNA is a single process."

Icthyostega: Upper Devonian

PALEONTOLOGY: ON THE ADAPTATIONS OF AN ANCIENT AMPHIBIAN: "One of the defining events in the history of life was the emergence of terrestrial vertebrates from early fish. The oldest known fossils that illustrate the transition to land are those of Ichthyostega from the Upper Devonian of East Greenland. This 360-million-year-old amphibian resembled fish in many features of its skeleton, but possessed pelvic (hip) and pectoral (shoulder) girdles and limbs capable of supporting the body and allowing movement on land."

Important DNA Repair Mechanism Linked To Premature Aging Yields

Important DNA Repair Mechanism Linked To Premature Aging Yields: "The first step in TCR is the recognition that an RNAPII is stalled. Subsequently one of several things must happen. Most theoretical models have assumed that the stalled RNAPII has to be degraded and moved out of the way so the lesion can be repaired, after which transcription of the gene must start over with a new RNAPII.
Other possibilities are that the original RNAPII is somehow made to start up again, bypassing the lesion, or that the RNAPII is made to back up, digesting some of the messenger RNA it has already made, and have another go at transcription. In these cases, the likelihood of errors in the transcribed RNA and eventually in the resulting protein is increased.
What Cooper and her colleagues found, however, was a different, unexpected path. It appears that instead of being removed, the stalled RNAPII can be left in place and remodeled by the protein machinery of transcription-couple repair, so that repairs to the DNA can proceed without the loss of the messenger RNA that has already been formed."

E-MAP Technique Offers New View of Dynamic Biological Landscape

HHMI News: Technique Offers New View of Dynamic Biological Landscape: "A new technique for analyzing the network of genetic interactions promises to change how researchers study the dynamic biological landscape of the cell. The technology, which is called epistatic mini array profiles (E-MAP), has already been used to assign new functions to known genes, to uncover the roles of previously uncharacterized proteins, and to define how biochemical pathways and proteins interact with one another."

Dynamics of DNA transcription

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL): Scientists model the dynamics of DNA transcription: "Genomic sequences consist of only four distinct nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). This sequence is strung together by a sugar-phosphate backbone, and stabilized by a complementary strand of DNA that protects each base in the sequence as a pair, wrapped inside the familiar double helix. Genes are the stretches of DNA that contain the blueprints for specific protein and range in length from a few hundred to several thousands of base pairs. Think of them as discrete, linear 'files' stored within the genome. The sequential reading of these files by a protein complex is known as transcription. The modeling technique is capable of predicting transcription initiation sites in DNA sequences and may predict the binding sites of important proteins in the transcriptional process."