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Blog takes a break
Wild Types is taking a summer break! Check back at the end of the month for new posts.
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Vitamin A: From past to present
Vitamin A and its fellow fat-soluble vitamins were discovered a century ago, but knowledge about vitamin A goes back to ancient times. For example, 3,500-year-old Egyptian papyri recorded the role of...
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No more secondary antibodies: Universal adaptor for protein detection
ELISAs would be easier without having to deal with secondary antibodies. Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ELISA.jpg Imagine being able to do your Western blots, ELISAs and...
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Poop, prunes and proteomics: one of these is not discussed in this blog post
While much of the recent research focus has been on understanding what makes up a microbiome in various parts of our bodies and how it impacts health and disease, there is less of a focus on how we...
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Alzheimer’s disease fibrils keep their shape
Molecular structure of amyloid fibrils from patient 1. Image provided by Robert Tycko. One telltale sign of Alzheimer’s disease is the finding of clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid (Aβ) in the...
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Getting a closer look at vesicle maturation
Improved superresolution microscopic technique allows researchers to view vesicle maturation into endosomes. Image provided by Wendell Lim. Understanding the tightly controlled processes in cells at...
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Finally figuring out how insect repellent DEET works
An artistic rendition of mosquitoes avoiding a volatile plume of the newly discovered repellents whose chemical structures are shown.Credit: Pinky Kain The insect repellent DEET has been used for 60...
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Fishing out the details of how tilapia tolerate salt
Tilapia can tolerate a wide range of salt concentrations. Image provided by Dietmar Kueltz. Tilapia that grace our dinner tables are interesting critters: The fish can change the workings of their...
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Recognizing winners of 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Thomas Sudhof It’s been a very exciting day to have three ASBMB members to win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in vesicle trafficking. James Rothman of Yale University,...
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Explaining how 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry impacted biochemistry
This morning, three scientists heard the news that their work on computer simulations garnered them the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Martin Karplus of the Université de Strasbourg, France, and...
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Double whammy: Making antibiotics more effective by using inhibitors of...
Nitric oxide inhibitors make antibiotics work more effectively. Image credit to Jeff Holden. It happens repeatedly in science: Research in one area serendipitously is found to have potential...
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Reporter’s notebook: the pizza that launched 3,000 words
Naked Pizza graces my parties. In January, there was an email waiting for me from an ASBMB member when I got back from vacation. Congratulating me on my story on omega-6 fatty acids in the American...
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Trauma-induced sepsis: Trying to catch it before it erupts
Trauma-induced sepsis is a critical concern in intensive care units. Image fromhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Respiratory_therapist.jpg Patients suffering from traumatic injuries in an intensive...
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Unexpected role for serotonin in glucose uptake during pregnancy
Image provided by http://www.flickr.com/photos/harinaivoteza/ Pregnancy demands a lot from the mother’s metabolism: She has to steadily supply sufficient amounts of nutrients to the growing fetus over...
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Tackling diabetes treatment from a different angle
Image from http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/diabetes_slides.htm Midway through National Diabetes Month, researchers report the discovery of two small molecules that could lead to new treatments...
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What happens to muscle as women age?
Rembrandt’s “Old Woman Reading”. Image from ErgsArt “Little old lady” is a phrase we use in everyday language, but what makes women lose their muscle size and function as they age? In a paper just out...
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Why I voted for the Rosalind Franklin bobblehead
I credit the actress Juliet Stevenson for helping me chose a career in science. When I was 18, as part of the “A” level course in biology, my high school biology teacher let us watch a made-for-TV...
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Sniff-n-scratch: How mosquitoes sniff us out
Image credit: Genevieve Tauxe Researchers have figured out how mosquitoes pick up our scents. In a paper just out in the journal Cell, a team led by Anandasarkar Ray at the University of California,...
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Predicting heart failure through metabolic profiling
The illustration shows the major signs and symptoms of heart failure. Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heartfailure.jpg Researchers say they now have a reliable predictor for heart failure....
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Happy holidays!
Wild Types will be taking a short holiday break. To tide you over the holidays, check out the science versions of holiday songs that I, ASBMB editor’s Angela Hopp and ASBMB’s two science policy...
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