P roteins possess thousands of degrees of freedom, and yet, they can rapidly and reliably find their way into well-defined folded configurations (1). In the cell, these folded proteins carry out highly specific motions critical to cargo transport and force transduction, energy generation, and catalysis. However, how is this possible given their incongruously large conformation spaces? Is their ...

irst there was green fluorescent protein (GFP) from jellyfish, then came red fluorescent protein (DsRed) from coral. Now researchers from the University of California at Irvine show that DsRed may become equally indispensable for tracking cells, organelles, and fusion proteins by turning them... green? Ian Parker says he and his colleagues made the discovery quite by accident while exploring th...

Togetherness, molecular style O ne way to switch the function of a cell surface protein is to force it into a different membrane domain. On page 647, Nicholson and Stanners describe a second method: diluting it within its domain with an abundance of defective partners. The approach might provide a way to neutralize a protein that is over-produced in most cancers. Some surface proteins lie compl...

magine inserting a piece of string into an inflated balloon without letting any of the air out. An analogous problem confronts cells in the production of integral membrane-spanning proteins, which must be inserted partway into the ER without letting the ER calcium stores leak into the cytoplasm. On page 261, Haigh and Johnson show that the ER lumenal chaperone protein BiP controls one end of a ...

P roteins adopt an amazing array of sequence-dependent structures that enable them to perform the many chemical functions critical to life. Over the past decade, however, it has become clear that many different protein sequences can also form misfolded, insoluble aggregates known as amyloid fibrils, with common structural elements. Amyloid fibrils appear to be involved in a number of diseases, ...

microorganisms are important components of soil. some soil filamentous fungi such aspenicilium produce many bioactive small molecules, or secondary metabolites, that range frombeneficial bioactive compounds to harmful toxins. in this study, the metabolites of threepenicillium species (p. goditanum, p. moldavicum and p. corylophilum) were extracted byadding ethyl acetate to liquid cultures. the ...

let $g$ be a finite $p$-soluble group‎, ‎and $p$ a sylow $p$-subgroup of $g$‎. ‎it is proved‎ ‎that if all elements of $p$ of order $p$ (or of order ${}leq 4$ for $p=2$) are‎ ‎contained in the $k$-th term of the upper central series of $p$‎, ‎then the $p$-length of‎ ‎$g$ is at most $2m+1$‎, ‎where $m$ is the greatest integer such that‎ ‎$p^m-p^{m-1}leq k$‎, ‎and the exponent of the image of $p$...