Insulin, long recognized as a primary regulator of blood glucose, is now also understood to play key roles in neuroplasticity, neuromodulation, and neurotrophism.
Insulin, long recognized as a primary regulator of blood glucose, is now also understood to play key roles in neuroplasticity, neuromodulation, and neurotrophism.
Present in every tissue of the body, ubiquitin appears to be involved in a dizzying array of functions, from cell cycle and division to organelle and ribosome biogenesis, as well as the response to viral infection. The protein plays at least two role
Despite its discovery as a protein that seems to show up everywhere, at least in eukaryotic cells, researchers are only beginning to scratch the surface of all of the cellular functions involving ubiquitin. As a monomer, ubiquitin can bind and tag ot
Telomeres are repetitive, noncoding sequences that cap the ends of linear chromosomes. They consist of hexameric nucleotide sequences (TTAGGG in humans) repeated hundreds to thousands of times. Telomeres protect the protein-coding sequences of DNA on
A transition-state mimic has the power to bind an enzyme at its tipping point as strongly as any available inhibitor and more strongly than most, preventing enzymatic activity. In order to replicate the structure of an enzyme’s transition state, whic
There are five steps of autophagosome biogenesis: induction, expansion, vesicle completion, fusion, and cargo degradation. While much has been learned over the past few decades about how this process works, the big question that remains is where the
Not all inflammation leads to pain. Despite widespread infection followed by fever, colds rarely cause pain. But when some cytokines and certain immune cells are active near pain-sensing nerves, they trigger receptors that convey pain sensations to t
The tongue may be the epicenter of taste sensation, but taste receptors are scattered throughout the digestive and respiratory tracts.
Looking for a more realistic way to study memory, we turned to place cells—a network of cells that record a rat’s memory of an environment. Each place cell would fire only when the rat was in one particular location in space, creating a map as the
Long-term potentiation (LTP), discovered in the 1970s, was later shown to be the molecular basis of memory. Since many diseases of aging affect memory, could memory formation and storage be altered by the same mechanisms in normal aging and diseased