News by Subject Biology

A detailed new model of a bacterial secretion system provides directions for developing precisely targeted antibiotics.

A University of California, Riverside, research team has come up with a new approach to targeting cancer cells that circumvents a challenge faced by currently available cancer drugs.

In 2020, NASA and European-Russian missions will look for evidence of past life on Mars. But while volcanic, igneous rock predominates on the Red Planet, virtually the entire Earth fossil record comes from sedimentary rocks. Addressing the problem in Frontiers in Earth Science, Swedish scientists have begun compiling evidence of fossilized microbes in underexplored igneous rock environments on Earth, to help guide where to search for a Martian fossil record - and what to look for.

Researchers have mapped the molecular structure and dynamics of an aggressive protein modification that spurs on Alzheimer's disease. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers greater understanding of the microscopic, toxic protein fragments, called beta amyloids (Aβ), that cause rapid acceleration of Alzheimer's disease.

A team of Brown University researchers found that opsin 3 -- a protein closely related to rhodopsin, the protein that enables low-light vision -- has a role in adjusting the amount of pigment produced in human skin, a determinant of skin color.

Synthetic proteins have now been created that can move in response to their environment in predictable and tunable ways. These proteins can use their movement to disrupt lipid membranes in cells. They show promise as tools for drug delivery, and might eventually rival the efficiency of virus vehicles, but without some of their drawbacks.