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Scientists have uncovered one way tobacco smoking causes cancer and makes it harder to treat by undermining the body's anti-cancer safeguards. Their study links tobacco smoking to harmful changes in DNA called 'stop-gain mutations' that tell the body to stop making certain proteins before they are fully formed. They found these stop-gain mutations were especially prevalent in genes known as 'tumor-suppressors,' which make proteins that would normally prevent abnormal cells from growing. "Our study showed that smoking is associated with changes to DNA that disrupt the formation of tumor suppressors," says Nina Adler. "Without them, abnormal cells are allowed to...

Canadian doctor Charles Hoffe believes that the mRNA vaccines manufacture microscopic blood clots in the capillaries of the vaccinated and at least 60 percent could eventually succumb to heart failure. Charles Hoffe, who practices medicine at Lytton British Columbia, explained: “We now know that only 25 percent of the ‘vaccine’ injected into a person’s arm actually stays in your arm. The other 75 percent is collected by your lymphatic system and literally fed into your circulation so these little packages of messenger RNA, and by the way in a single dose of Moderna ‘vaccine’ there are literally 40 trillion mRNA...

Imagine that I’m a mad scientist (or perhaps just a geneticist who doesn’t blink an eye while fiddling with nature’s design) and I want to see what happens when I introduce substantial genetic changes into a chimpanzee.In my experimentation, I double the chimp’s height, change it’s hair color to yellow, induce mutations to change eye color, give it the ability to see better at night, increase muscle strength in its lower body so that it can jump long distances, and several dozen other changes. The end result looks different, acts different, has changes in physiology, its capacity to tolerate heat,...

Computing the "Best Case" Probability of Proteins from Actual Data, and Falsifying a Prediction of Darwinism Kirk Durston July 28, 2015 4:52 PM Biological life requires thousands of different protein families, about 70 percent of which are "globular" proteins, with a three-dimensional shape that is unique to each family of proteins. An illustration is shown in the picture at the top of this post. This 3D shape is necessary for a particular biological function and is determined by the sequence of the different amino acids that make up that protein. In other words, it is not biology that determines the...

How did life on Earth begin? It's been one of modern biology's greatest mysteries: How did the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth lead to the complex molecules needed to create living, breathing organisms? Now, researchers say they've found the missing link. Between 4.6 billion and 4.0 billion years ago, there was probably no life on Earth. The planet's surface was at first molten and even as it cooled, it was getting pulverized by asteroids and comets. All that existed were simple chemicals. But about 3.8 billion years ago, the bombardment stopped, and life arose. Most scientists think...

One of the great challenges in molecular biology is to determine the three-dimensional structure of large biomolecules such as proteins. But this is a famously difficult and time-consuming task. The standard technique is x-ray crystallography, which involves analyzing the x-ray diffraction pattern from a crystal of the molecule under investigation. That works well for molecules that form crystals easily. But many proteins, perhaps most, do not form crystals easily. And even when they do, they often take on unnatural configurations that do not resemble their natural shape. So finding another reliable way of determining the 3-D structure of large biomolecules...

Characteristics passed between generations are not decided solely by DNA, but can be brought about by other material in cells, new research shows. Scientists studied proteins found in cells, known as histones, which are not part of the genetic code, but act as spools around which DNA is wound. Histones are known to control whether or not genes are switched on. Researchers found that naturally occurring changes to these proteins, which affect how they control genes, can be sustained from one generation to the next and so influence which traits are passed on. The finding demonstrates for the first time...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have discovered antiviral proteins in cells that naturally fight off influenza infections, a finding that may lead to better ways to make vaccines and protect people against the flu. They said a family of genes act as cell sentries that guard cells from an invading influenza virus, the team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell. "This prevents the virus from even getting into the cell," said Stephen Elledge of Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Investigator at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "It is out there fighting the flu all of the time," Elledge...

Information in Living Organisms Theorem 28: There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter... (for remainder, click link below)

In my previous post I mentioned work by Pablo Debenedetti on ‘toy models’ of water. The places to look are: Buldyrev et al., PNAS 104, 20177 (2007) (here) for the solvation thermodynamics of ‘spherical’ water; and Patel et al., Biophys. J. 93, 4116 (2007) (here) and J. Chem. Phys. 128, 175102 (2008) (here) for water-explicit lattice models of proteins. And in discussing recent work on the mechanism of urea-induced protein denaturation, I neglected to mention Bruce Berne’s PNAS paper from late last year with Ruhong Zhou, Dave Thirumalai and Lan Hua (105, 16928; paper here). That paper on MD simulations...

Nuclear magnetic resonance spies the atomic details of proteins in action. Scientists have used NMR to look at proteins including TTHA1718 (above) inside living cells.Nature The atomic structures of proteins at work inside cells can now be probed, thanks to researchers who have modified a technique that is already widely used in labs and for medical imaging.When a protein is inside a cell — rather than in a test tube — it behaves subtly differently because it may be interacting with other biological molecules that float around in the cellular space. Because proteins are hard to work with unless they...

... We present a novel computational approach for describing the formation of oligomeric assemblies at experimental concentrations and timescales. We propose an extension to the Markovian state model approach, where one includes low concentration oligomeric states analytically. This allows simulation on long timescales (seconds timescale) and at arbitrarily low concentrations (e.g., the micromolar concentrations found in experiments), while still using an all-atom model for protein and solvent. As a proof of concept, we apply this methodology to the oligomerization of an Abeta peptide fragment (Abeta 21–43). Abeta oligomers are now widely recognized as the primary neurotoxic structures leading to Alzheimer's...

The PandeGroup has all been very excited about the great turnout of FAH donors over the last few weeks, allowing FAH to go over a petaflop. The PS3's have been cranking out some very useful scientific results due to the new scientific software present in v1.2. The PS3's are so fast, we've been looking at the results sometimes 2x to 3x a day (instead of a couple times a month). If all goes well, we're hoping to write up these results soon (maybe a few weeks) for peer reviewed publication. It's also interesting to think about what we want to...

We live in the age of the prion, says New York writer DT Max in his introduction to this neat little medical whodunit. The claim sounds worthy of a car advert. You are never alone with a prion. That sort of thing. In fact, the prion is a strange, non-living infectious agent whose behaviour was widely disputed until US medical researcher Stanley Prusiner confirmed its existence in a series of elegant experiments that won him a Nobel Prize for physiology in 1997. Now, most scientists accept prions are responsible for a range of modern curses: mad cow disease, the fatal...

Time for an update. The Free Republic Folding team #36120 started about 4 years ago, and became popular in December of 2005. We will hit 30,000,000 points this week and congratulations are in order to all folders. Our FreeRepublic team of 475 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is...

Pharmed food crop approved for growth despite controversy.Rice modified to express proteins often found in breast milk will be planted in Kansas. It's certainly not the first crop designed to produce pharmaceutical proteins given the go-ahead in the United States or elsewhere (see 'Turning plants into protein factories'). But this is among the first food crops containing genes that produce human proteins to gain approval for large-scale planting. Many other pharmaceutical genetically-modified (GM) crops are grown indoors or in inedible plants such as tobacco. The rice strains, made by Ventria Bioscience in Sacramento, California, produce lysozyme, lactoferrin and human serum...

Cardiologists are increasingly using adult stem cells in clinical trials to repair hearts following heart attacks, but no one has understood how the therapy actually works. Now, in animal experiments, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have deconstructed the process, describing how the stem cells fuse with heart muscle cells to create new cells that repopulate the ailing organ. In a paper posted at Online First of the journal Circulation Research, investigators found that this fusion is only possible if two cell adhesion proteins that stick to each other like Velcro are available to attach...

NEW YORK: A newly designed porous membrane, so thin that it's invisible edge-on, might revolutionise the way doctors and scientists manipulate objects as small as molecules. The 50-atom thick filter can withstand surprisingly high pressures and may be a key to better separation of blood proteins for dialysis patients, speeding ion exchange in fuel cells and purifying air and water at the nanoscopic level. "It's amazing, we have a material as thin as some of the molecules it's sorting, and riddled with holes - but it can withstand enough pressure to make real-world nano-filtering a practical reality," said Christopher Striemer...

OK, new thread for the next week, celebrating 100,000 Work Units! First, a big shout out to the SETI and BOINC members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 1040 processors and 420 user names. We now have 29 members who have contributed at least 100,000 points each. Woo-Hoo! Even more impressive, our team now boasts 342 members who have folded at least 1,000 points. That is more than the entire number of folders for our erstwhile left-wing environazi competitors! Free Republic Folding@Home...

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have visualized in a living animal how cells use a critical biological process to dice and splice genetic material to create unique and varied proteins. The scientists say the findings, made in mice, help explain a key wonder of human biology: how the same genes found in every cell of an individual’s body can produce different proteins in different tissues and organs. These varied proteins, in turn, dictate the function of each tissue or organ. The findings also may offer insight into a number of diseases, including cancer, in which the genetic process --...