Articles by Christopher Smith

Molecular Modeling, Visualization, and Structure Prediction Software (Additional material not included in the print edition) Courtesy of Theoretical Biophysics GroupBeckman InstituteUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThe photosynthetic reaction center of the purple bacterium, Rhodopseudomonas viridis (rendered using VMD) The aim of some life science researchers is to understand human physiology and the various diseases and mutations that can cause the body to go haywire. Accomplishing th

Forty-six years ago, Edwin Krebs and colleagues changed the way researchers understood the regulation of protein activity. In a landmark paper, these authors described the regulation of glycogen phosphorylase by attachment of a phosphate group.1 Four years later, these same authors discovered that this phosphorylation event was mediated by the enzyme glycogen phosphorylase kinase (kinases are enzymes that catalyze the transfer of a phosphate group from ATP to a substrate protein).2 And nine year

Data Mining Software for Genomics, Proteomics and Expression Data (Part 1) Data Mining Software for Genomics, Proteomics and Expression Data (Part 2) High-throughput (HT) sequencing, microarray screening and protein expression profiling technologies drive discovery efforts in today's genomics and proteomics laboratories. These tools allow researchers to generate massive amounts of data, at a rate orders of magnitude greater than scientists ever anticipated. Initiatives to sequence entire genom

Plant Nucleic Acid Purification Kits Plant Nucleic Acid Purification Kits (continued) QIAGEN DNeasy Procedure Bio-Rad's portable Helios Gene Gun System By most accounts the world's population will increase to about 8 billion by 2025.1 Ironically, as population increases, arable land acres committed to agriculture are slowly but surely dwindling. Although major inroads, such as precision agriculture and resource conservation, are being made in farming technology, these new agricultural methods

Products & Services for Knockout Gene Technology Gene Knockout/Targeting Information Resources A few years ago, a scholarly scientific society published an anecdote in its monthly newsletter that described the different approaches to scientific discovery taken by geneticists and biochemists. In the story, a geneticist and a biochemist are on a hill overlooking an auto manufacturing plant, observing parts and workers going into one end of the plant and a finished product moving out of the othe

Courtesy of Zymark Combinatorial Chemistry Products and Services Finding cures for cancer, AIDS, and the plethora of other ailments that plague humans conjures up images from the 1992 movie Medicine Man. In it, Sean Connery as Dr. Robert Campbell treks through the tropical Amazon forests searching for an enigmatic plant that seems to produce a cancer-curing compound. Although scientists may never approach Mother Nature's ability to create novel compounds, new combinatorial chemistry techniques

Date: November 9, 1998Baculovirus Expression Vectors In the recent past, efforts to elucidate the relationship between protein structure and biological function have intensified. Of particular interest is an understanding of the elements of sequence and structure that mediate specific functions. Often the protein of interest is in low abundance in its natural source and can be difficult to purify and/or unstable--subject to proteolytic cleavage or unfolding/non specific refolding during exhaust

Date: August 31, 1998Table 1: Molecular Modeling Software, Table 2: Structure & Modeling Information and Table 3: Visualization & Image Resources The term "molecular modeling" usually conjures up two images: three-dimensional (3-D) depictions of small molecular structures (for example, benzene) and biological macromolecular structures (for example, proteins, DNA, and RNA). Some of the earliest and perhaps most renowned 3-D representations of a biological macromolecule were the wire-fram

Liquid chrom-atography is to the protein re-searcher what the hammer is to the carpenter. Liquid chromatographic techniques comprise a major portion of the repertoire of protocols the protein researcher can call upon to purify and analyze proteins. Modern liquid chromatography has come a long way since its infancy-when early matrices were capable of providing only crude separations-to modern matrices and technologies that can accomplish the purification of a protein to homogeneity in a single

Date: February 2, 1998 Chart 1 Chart 2 Prokaryotic expression systems, reviewed in the September 1, 1997, issue of The Scientist were part of the early repertoire of research tools in molecular biology. Although the expression of recombinant protein in prokaryotes provided a means to develop other research tools (antibodies, for example ) and study basic aspects of biological function, the scope and depth of this research were limited, especially with regard to eukaryotic proteins. The de novo

Cancer, the scourge of the 20th century, is in its most basic form the uncontrolled proliferation of invasive cells as a consequence of perturbations in the genetic and biochemical processes of a normal cell cycle. Deciphering the molecular, genetic, biochemical, and physiological aspects of this process in normal and abnormal cells has received much impetus these past two decades, as researchers seek to understand the nature of cancer, apoptosis, cell differentiation, and tissue regeneration.