Related topics: protein · amino acids

Study reveals unique physical, chemical properties of cicada wings

Biological structures sometimes have unique features that engineers would like to copy. For example, many types of insect wings shed water, kill microbes, reflect light in unusual ways and are self-cleaning. While researchers ...

Scientists watch proteins self-assemble

Enabling bioengineers to design new molecular machines for nanotechnology applications is one of the possible outcomes of a study by University of Montreal researchers that was published in Nature Structural and Molecular ...

Using gold and light to study molecules in water

Thanks to a new device that is the size of a human hair, it is now possible to detect molecules in a liquid solution and observe their interactions. This is of major interest for the scientific community, as there is currently ...

Virtual nanoscopy: Like 'Google Earth' for cell biologists

Just as users of Google Earth can zoom in from space to a view of their own backyard, researchers can now navigate biological tissues from a whole embryo down to its subcellular structures thanks to recent advances in electron ...

Mimicking living cells: Synthesizing ribosomes

Synthetic biology researchers at Northwestern University, working with partners at Harvard Medical School, have for the first time synthesized ribosomes—cell structures responsible for generating all proteins and enzymes ...

The origin of life in an RNA pocket

This story begins several billion years ago. There's only chemistry, no biology—that is, plenty of chemical compounds exist on Earth, but life hasn't yet emerged. Then, among myriads of randomly self-assembled chemical ...

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