Volume 3 Issue 4, April 2007

Drug screening in the immediate term will be best accomplished by early use of primary cells in which the target of the screen is a network of proteins measured in populations of single cells.

Interdisciplinary work in the life sciences at the boundaries of biology, chemistry and physics is making enormous strides. This progress was showcased at the recent Single Molecule Biophysics conference.

The Broad Institute was founded with the vision of creating a truly collaborative biomedical research environment, and small molecules are a central focus.

Synthetic oligopeptides chemically modified with environmentally sensitive fluorophores enable real-time visualization of peptide binding to MHC molecules. This technology will expand our understanding of antigen presentation and enable visualization of fluorescent peptide binding to a wide variety of receptors in living cells.

Just when we thought that all of the interesting biochemical cofactors have been identified, a new metabolite consisting of thiamine and ATP has been isolated from a number of organisms.

Guanine-rich quadruplex-forming sequences within DNA and RNA are prevalent and are suspected of regulating telomere replication, transcription and pre-mRNA splicing. The recent discovery of quadruplex-forming sequences in the 5′ untranslated regions of various proto-oncogenes suggests an important role for such sequences in inhibition of mRNA translation.

The gliding motility of individual bacterial cells has been a deep mystery so far. Recent results provide the first molecular-level insights into the mechanism of this process.

FNR is a global regulator of the Escherichia coli aerobic-anaerobic growth transition and relies on an [Fe-S] cluster cofactor to control its oxygen-dependent activity. Details of the chemical reaction of oxygen with the [Fe-S] cluster reveal how this cofactor is used for oxygen sensing.