Now this is a very weird preprint, but it looks like the authors have done a pretty thorough job on it. It's about absorption and fluorescence in peptides, which (depending on your perspective!) might sound like a very dry and uninteresting topic, or one that's certainly of interest but has been pretty well worked out over the years. After all, we've been looking at peptides and proteins spectrosc ..read more

Well, we were just talking the other day about how many tumors are a low-oxygen environment, and the adaptations that go on because of this. Tumor cells often switch to anaerobic metabolism, while at the same time trying to bring in new blood vessels (for oxygen, for nutrients, for disposing of waste products, etc.) This angiogenesis has long been a target for anticancer drugs, of course, with a p ..read more

It's safe to say that most people hadn't really heard of lipid nanoparticles until the advent of the mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines. I don't mean to imply that they have a huge profile in the public consciousness, but a lot more people are aware of them who aren't actually formulation scientists. The idea behind these species is that they form very tiny capsules/aggregates that can carry sensitiv ..read more

Mass spectrometry continues to take over the world - that's all I can tell you. These two papers in a recent issue of ACS Central Science will illustrate that - they both describe a technique called "electron capture charge reduction" MS, which produces some startling results at very high molecular weights.  How high? How about 100,000 daltons or more? These are really large protein complexes ..read more

If you don't know anyone who does research on (or using) yeast, you might not have heard about this problem. But for several years now, there's been an annoying and expensive problem for those labs that do depend on yeast cultures: sometimes the yeast die for no apparent reason (or just fail to grow in the first place). Here's an article at Science, and if you look around, you'll see plenty of evi ..read more

I wanted to be sure to mention the results of this competition, announced earlier this year. The organizers (Leash Bio) focused on three protein targets (BRD4, EPHX2, and good ol' bovine serum albumin), and they provided assay data from a series of DNA-encoded library screens on roughly 133 million chemical species against these. These were mostly trisubstituted triazines, a classic combinatorial ..read more

I really hope that the plan described here works out and that it becomes more popular. The ERROR project (Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research) is going to pay people to review high-profile papers in psychology looking for errors in code, statistics, and citations. Participants will get a payment for every paper they review, with bonuses for each error caught (and those pay out on ..read more

OK, we know that cells transcribe DNA into messenger RNA, and that these mRNAs (after some processing) go on to be translated into proteins by the ribosomes. But how does a cell know which proteins it should be making, which genes it should be transcribing at any given time? And how does it know how much protein synthesis it should have going at all? The only answers that makes sense are networks ..read more

In this post, I will not discuss the personal life or behavior of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I am speaking only of his scientific and medical opinions, which I was willing to ignore while he was pursuing his hopeless campaign for the presidency. But now that he has dropped out of the race, endorsed Donald Trump, and has been added to Trump's transition team to prepare for his possible re-election to t ..read more

There have been many, many attempts over the years to link Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia) with some sort of infectious agent. It's not an implausible idea, but given the slow development of the disease and its clinical variability, it's a very difficult one to prove. It seems clear that inflammation is a player in AD and other such conditions, and you can't rule out that being s ..read more