Articles by Megan Stephan

Gadget freaks love to "mod" their toys, and protein engineers are no exception.

Integrins serve as the cell's conduit to the outside world, sensing the external environment and passing on instructions: differentiate or not, adhere or move on, live or die.

Jerry Radich is looking for a needle in a haystack, and he's counting on a microfluidics device to help him find it.

It's been a busy year for the microfluidics industry.

a last resting place for worn-out, misfolded, or otherwise unwanted proteins.

Pain is one of the more complex perceptions.

The ion channel field has been a bit charged up lately, thanks largely to an impressive series of crystalline structures published by Rod MacKinnon's group at Rockefeller University.

To the lay public, sugars are the villains behind expanding waistlines and rotting teeth, and until recently, the view from the lab bench was not much different. Sugars were considered so irrelevant, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ram Sasisekharan, that biochemists "mainly developed tools to remove them from proteins they were studying."Today, however, the mood is decidedly different. Sugars, or more properly, the complex sugars called glycans, are now recognized as critic

Courtesy of Caliper TechnologiesImagine visiting the doctor's office for a routine annual checkup. Instead of drawing several vials of blood for analysis by an outside diagnostics lab, the doctor collects a single drop. Using a breadbox-sized instrument, she runs 20 or so tests in a matter of minutes and discusses the results with you before you leave. Meanwhile, a large pharmaceutical company down the road is using a similar, albeit larger instrument to analyze the biochemical properties of a m

The outer ear funnels sound waves from the air to the ear drum. For humans, sounds in the range of 20–20,000 Hz are transmitted by three bones (the smallest bones in the body) resting under the ear drum to a membrane lying on the cochlear surface. Vibrations passed on by the fluid-filled spiral tube reach the hair cells inside, each of which supports a tuft of 30–150 stereocilia arranged in rows of increasing height. These cells transduce mechanical signals into chemical ones through

OPEN WIDE:© 2002 Nature Publishing GroupMscL has one of the widest channel openings. Here transmembrane (TM) segments are in the open state. The side view is shown in relation to a hypothetically distorted bilayer. (Reprinted with permissionStress – the bane of modern existence. Even cells have to deal with it, in its mechanical forms, at least. Osmotic pressure and shear forces from the environment signal dangerous situations that threaten the integrity of the cell membrane. Membrane

A burgeoning family of once controversial proteins still has surprises on tap

Researchers use spin-labeling techniques to bring protein structures to life

Courtesy of Kaspar Locher  B12 TRANSPORTER EXPOSED: Ribbon diagram of the B12 transporter BtuCD from E. coli, with cyclotetravanadate bound at the ATP-binding sites. The transporter is assembled from four subunits, two each of the membrane spanning BtuC (yellow and red) and the cytoplasmic BtuD (green and blue). The ATP binding cassette transporters epitomize nature's ability to re-use a successful protein motif. With diverse membrane-spanning regions, but highly conserved soluble ATP bi