Mechanosensation: Touch at the molecular level

Mechanosensation: Touch at the molecular level

Touch and the related sense of proprioception are the most ubiquitous, yet the least understood, of the senses. In vertebrates, the sensory terminals of touch receptors and proprioreceptors are far from the cell bodies, dispersed throughout the body and embedded in other tissues, impeding the electrophysiological recording of mechanoreceptor potentials and biochemical purification of components...

Ferroelectricity at molecular level

Automated Metabolic Reconstruction at the Molecular Level

The analysis of metabolism in bacteria facilitates a new application area such as drug synthesis or toxin degradation, using genetically engineered bacteria. However, the understanding of bacterial metabolism is still premature, because in a newly sequenced bacterium, gene functions are determined for half its total ORFs. Only from sequence similarity, it is impossible to decide functions of th...

Asymmetry at the molecular level in biology

Naturally occurring biological molecules are made of homochiral building blocks. Proteins are composed of L-amino acids (and not D-amino acids); nucleic acids such as DNA have D-ribose sugars (and not L-ribose sugars). It is not clear why nature selected a particular chirality. Selection could have occurred by chance or as a consequence of basic physical chemistry. Possible proposals, including...

Teaching molecular biophysics at the graduate level.