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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…)

Berkeley Lab Scientists Achieve Breakthrough in Nanocomposite for High-Capacity Hydrogen Storage

Since the 1970s, hydrogen has been touted as a promising alternative to fossil fuels due to its clean combustion —unlike the combustion of fossil fuels, which spews greenhouse gases and harmful pollutants, hydrogen’s only combustion by-product is water. Compared to gasoline, hydrogen is lightweight, can provide a higher energy density and is readily available. But there’s a reason we’re not already living in a hydrogen economy: to replace gasoline as a fuel, hydrogen must be safely and densely stored, yet easily accessed. Limited by materials unable to leap these conflicting hurdles, hydrogen storage technology has lagged behind other clean energy candidates. (more…)

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Building Molecular ‘Cages’ to Fight Disease

Berkeley Lab Scientists Achieve Breakthrough in Nanocomposite for High-Capacity Hydrogen Storage