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Building Molecular ‘Cages’ to Fight Disease

By Guest PostJune 9, 2012Scienceartificial vaccines, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, building blocks, circulation, david baker, drug, drug delivery, duilio cascio, human like proteins, lego blocks, medicine, michael sawaya, molecular biology, molecular cages, molecular structure, nanoscale materials, neil king, puzzle pieces, specialized proteins, tangles of ribbon, three-dimensional, tiny structures, todd yeates, traditional vaccine, tumor cells, ucla, university of washington, virus derived proteins, yen ting lai

UCLA-created nanoscale protein containers could aid drug, vaccine delivery

UCLA biochemists have designed specialized proteins that assemble themselves to form tiny molecular cages hundreds of times smaller than a single cell. The creation of these miniature structures may be the first step toward developing new methods of drug delivery or even designing artificial vaccines.

“This is the first decisive demonstration of an approach that can be used to combine protein molecules together to create a whole array of nanoscale materials,” said Todd Yeates, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of the UCLA–DOE Institute of Genomics and Proteomics and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. (more…)

Breaking the Chain: ‘Molecular cap’ Blocks Processes that Lead to Alzheimer’s, HIV

By Guest PostJune 24, 2011Health, Sciencealzheimer disease, amino acids, amyloid diseases, amyloid fibers, biochemists, brain cells, california nanosystems institute, david baker, david eisenberg, disease, enzymes, fatal diseases, Germany, hiv infection, jan münch, jie liu, jorge barrio, lin jiang, lou gehrig, mad cow disease, meytal landau, microcrystallography, molecular inhibitors, onofrio zirafi, orange g, parkinson disease, proteins, semen derived enhancer of viral infection, sevi, sexual transmission of hiv, steric zippers, stuart sievers, synthetic amino acids, tau protein, treatments, united states, university of ulm, vqivyk

A new advance by UCLA biochemists has brought scientists one step closer to developing treatments that could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and prevent the sexual transmission of HIV.

The researchers report that they have designed molecular inhibitors that target specific proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease and HIV to prevent them from forming amyloid fibers, the elongated chains of interlocking proteins that play a key role in more than two dozen degenerative and often fatal diseases. (more…)

Scientists Unfolding Protein Mystery, Fighting Disease with Windows Azure

By Guest PostJune 14, 2011Technologyalzheimer, baker laboratory, benchmark, cancers, chris sinco, cloud computing, computational biology labs, computing power, david baker, dennis gannon, malaria, marlin eiben, Microsoft, microsoft research extreme computing group, modern diseases, needle, nikolas sgourakis, pankaj arora, protein, salmonella, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, seti, structure and behavior of proteins, university of washington, vacation, windows azure, world class researcher with a world class problem

*Microsoft has partnered with the University of Washington’s Baker Laboratory to help scientists supercharge the computing power of their protein folding research with Windows Azure. Helping scientists get faster results could mean speeding up cures for Alzheimer’s, cancers, salmonella, and malaria.*

REDMOND, Wash. – June 14, 2011 – Cloud computing is helping biologists uncloud one of nature’s biggest mysteries: proteins.

Microsoft has partnered with the University of Washington’s Baker Laboratory, one of the world’s top computational biology labs, to give scientists access to some high-caliber computing power. That, in turn, helps them explore and understand proteins, which could eventually lead to thwarting everything from Alzheimer’s to Malaria, and from cancer to salmonella. (more…)

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Building Molecular ‘Cages’ to Fight Disease

Breaking the Chain: ‘Molecular cap’ Blocks Processes that Lead to Alzheimer’s, HIV

Scientists Unfolding Protein Mystery, Fighting Disease with Windows Azure