Tag Archive | cell biology
LabBook June 1, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our new weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. […]
Light-Guided Biology #2: Infared Excitement
The rise of optogenetics — where flashes of light can manipulate brain activity and behavior — have excited scientists looking for more precise ways of manipulating cells and their components in the laboratory and the clinic. Two papers published this month by University of Chicago laboratories explore new methods with great scientific potential of controlling […]
Light-Guided Biology #1: TULIP Mania
The rise of optogenetics — where flashes of light can manipulate brain activity and rat behavior — have excited scientists looking for more precise ways of manipulating cells and their components in the laboratory and the clinic. Two papers published this month by University of Chicago laboratories explore new methods with great scientific potential of […]
The Risky Value of Imperfection
By Rob Mitchum Cells, like people, are not perfect. If a cell’s primary responsibility is to produce proteins, then it makes a remarkable amount of mistakes in that job, with some studies estimating that an error appears in as many as 1 out of every 5 proteins. Defective proteins can be a serious problem — […]
Doubling the Dictionary of Protein Modification
A cell is full of language. There’s the four-letter code of DNA, the slightly different four-letter dialect of RNA, and the three-letter words that direct the construction of proteins, which are built out of an alphabet of 20 amino acids. In recent years, scientists have slowly revealed another vocabulary superimposed on top of this language, […]
Time Travel in a Test Tube
In books and movies, time travel is typically fraught with negative consequences. Any attempt to change the past — say, stopping the JFK assassination, or taking your mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance — is bound to produce ripples of change that alter the future. But what if you could safely contain a […]
The Controller of Hippos and Yorkies
How does an organ know when to stop growing? It may sound like a riddle, but it’s a serious biological question with the potential for grave consequences. During development, an organism grows from a single cell up to trillions of cells. If that growth process overshoots its goal and doesn’t stop generating new cells, the […]
A Fickle Pump and its Protons
Like a basement in a flood plain, a cell needs a good pump. Cells must maintain a particular mix of ions inside their membrane walls, with low concentrations of sodium and high concentrations of potassium. The only problem is that cells are leaky, and sodium constantly rushes into the cell while potassium rushes out. To […]
Machine Gunning the Cell’s Legos
Actin is the Lego of the cell. The small proteins can be assembled into many different forms for a wide variety of uses: serving as a scaffold to keep the cell’s shape, a railroad for shipping packages, or a powerful motor to propel the cell or tear it in half. But actin itself is a […]
The Cellular UPS, Dr. Octopus, & a Hand-Off
Cells are often described as factories, and their product is protein. Thousands of different proteins are built by cellular structures called ribosomes, which translate DNA instructions into chains of amino acids. But in a cell, as in industry, manufacturing is only the first part of the story: products must also be shipped to their final […]
