http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. It is rare that an unpublished piece of research or theory remains significant after half a century. It is also a wonderful example of the boundless curiosity of the late Francis Crick. A previously unpublished work by Francis Crick and Jeffries Wyman from 1965 is now available, together with Jean-Pierre Changeux's recollections on the origins of the theory of Allostery and several important texts by various authors on the subject. These are part of a special issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB) published at the occasion of a Pasteur/EMBO Conference on Allosteric Interactions in Cell Signaling and Regulation to be held at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, May 14-17, 2013, to mark a half-century of research on this subject. http://phys.org/news285491539.html Biology Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:12:41 EST news285491539 (Phys.org)—Abhyudai Singh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, describes a new method to understand sources of "noise" in gene-expression that create variability in protein levels in a paper published in Molecular Systems Biology, a publication of Nature, on Aug. 28.  http://phys.org/news267867620.html Biology Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:40:30 EST news267867620 (Phys.org)—It's not just a few key genes and proteins that cycle on and off in humans in a 24-hour circadian pattern as the sun rises and falls. Thousands of genes in organs throughout the body show predictable daily fluctuations, and their cycles of activity are controlled in a complex variety of ways, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have discovered. http://phys.org/news265882303.html Biology Mon, 03 Sep 2012 09:12:14 EST news265882303 For about a dozen years, synthetic biologists have been working on ways to design genetic circuits to perform novel functions such as manufacturing new drugs, producing fuel or even programming the suicide of cancer cells. http://phys.org/news263195253.html Biology Fri, 03 Aug 2012 06:47:46 EST news263195253 As countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and parts of the United States and United Kingdom have fallen victim to catastrophic flooding in recent years, tolerance of crops to partial or complete submergence is a key target for global food security. Starved of oxygen, crops cannot survive a flood for long periods of time, leading to drastic reductions in yields for farmers. http://phys.org/news238595159.html Biology Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:26:11 EST news238595159 Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have today announced a new technique to reprogramme human cells, such as skin cells, into stem cells. Their process increases the efficiency of cell reprogramming by one hundred-fold and generates cells of a higher quality at a faster rate. http://phys.org/news237465562.html Biology Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:00:01 EST news237465562 While efforts to unlock the subtleties of DNA have produced remarkable insights into the code of life, researchers still grapple with fundamental questions. For example, the underlying mechanisms by which human genes are turned on and off -- generating essential proteins, determining our physical traits, and sometimes causing disease -- remain poorly understood. http://phys.org/news235992219.html Biology Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:24:23 EST news235992219 The diverse functions of living cells are all based on the information encoded in the structure of the hereditary material DNA. Gene expression must therefore be tightly controlled, and this task is accomplished by the binding of regulatory proteins to, and their removal from, specific DNA sequences. One class of large molecular machines known as Swi2/Snf2 remodelers plays a central role in modulating these processes. However, until now, it was not clear how Swi2/Snf2 remodelers actually work. http://phys.org/news229256847.html Biology Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:27:44 EST news229256847 During the development of an embryo, a large number of different, specialised cell-types arise from the fertilised egg. The genetic information is identical in all cells of an organism. Different properties of cells arise because the activity of genes is controlled and regulated by so called transcription factors. By switching genes on or off, the body makes muscle cells, bone cells, liver cells and many more. http://phys.org/news223553126.html Biology Mon, 02 May 2011 11:05:44 EST news223553126 With thousands of scientists across the globe searching for ways to use adult stem cells to fight disease, there's a growing emphasis on finding the "master regulators" that guide the differentiation of stem cells. New research from Rice University and the University of Cambridge suggests that a closely connected trio of regulatory proteins fulfills that role in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), the self-renewing cells the body uses to make new blood cells. http://phys.org/news192387683.html Biology Thu, 06 May 2010 18:40:01 EST news192387683 Regulatory proteins common to all eukaryotic cells can have additional, unique functions in embryonic stem (ES) cells, according to a study in the February 22 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology. If cancer progenitor cells—which function similarly to stem cells—are shown to rely on these regulatory proteins in the same way, it may be possible to target them therapeutically without harming healthy neighboring cells. http://phys.org/news186059375.html Biology Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:10:29 EST news186059375 Proteins are the executive agents that carry out all processes in a cell. Their activity is controlled and modified with the help of small chemical tags that can be dynamically added to and removed from the protein. 25 years after its first discovery, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg have now gained insight into the role of one of these tags, a small sugar residue, that is found on many different proteins across species. In the current online issue of Science they report that the addition of this sugar tag to proteins in the nucleus of a cell is vital for normal development in fruit flies. http://phys.org/news162814249.html Biology Fri, 29 May 2009 11:11:29 EST news162814249