/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2009-11-05T08:35:21-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/11/05/what_exactly_does_resveratrol_do.php Resveratrol's a mighty interesting compound. It seems to extend lifespan in yeast and various lower organisms, and has a wide range of effects in mice. Famously, GlaxoSmithKline has expensively bought out Sirtris, a company whose entire research program started with... 74125@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Aging and Lifespan 2009-11-05T08:35:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/10/28/nanotech_armor.php Now here's a completely weird idea: a group in Korea has encapsulated individual living yeast cells in silica. They start out by coating the cells with some charged polymers that are known to serve as a good substrate for silication,... 74115@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-10-28T10:05:53-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/10/16/engineering_receptors_not_quite_there_yet_not_exactly.php There have been several reports over the years of people engineering receptor proteins to make them do defined tasks. They've generally been using the bacterial periplasmic binding proteins (PBPs) as a starting point, attaching some sort of fluorescent group onto... 74100@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-10-16T08:17:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/10/07/a_nobel_for_ribosome_structure.php This was another Biology-for-Chemistry year for the Nobel Committee. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Cambridge), Thomas Steitz (Yale) and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Inst.) have won for X-ray crystallographic studies of the ribosome. Ribosomes are indeed significant, to put it lightly. For those outside... 74087@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-10-07T07:36:09-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/10/05/a_nobel_for_telomerase.php As many had expected, a Nobel Prize has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn (of UCSF), Carol Greider (of Johns Hopkins), and Jack Szostak (of Harvard Medical School/Howard Hughes Inst.) for their work on telomerase. Blackburn had been studying telomeres since... 74085@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-10-05T09:32:36-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/11/antioxidants_and_cancer_backwards.php Readers may remember a study from earlier this year that suggested that taking antioxidants canceled out some of the benefits of exercise. It seems that the reactive oxygen species themselves, which everyone's been assuming have to be fought, are actually... 74058@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cancer 2009-09-11T07:14:56-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/08/right_where_you_want_them.php Imagine a drug molecule, and imagine it's a really good one. That is, it's made it out of the gut just fine, out into the bloodstream, and it's even slipped in through the membrane of the targeted cells. Now what?... 74053@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-09-08T07:13:00-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/08/20/still_semaphoring_even_from_the_bottom_of_the_swimming_pool.php It's hard to think of a more important class of drug targets than the G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRS). And back about fifteen years ago, I thought I had a reasonable understanding of how they worked. I was quite wrong, even... 74032@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-08-20T06:47:03-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/08/18/schematic_notation_for_biology.php I see that there's a serious effort underway to standardize biochemical diagrams. About time! As a chemist, I don't mind admitting that I've been confused by many of these things over the years. As the current task force points out,... 74023@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-08-18T06:27:58-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/08/11/dealing_with_hedgehog_screening_results.php I was looking over a paper in PNAS, where a group at Stanford describes finding several small molecules that inhibit Hedgehog signaling. That's a very interesting (and ferociously complex) area, and the more tools that are available to study it,... 74009@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-08-11T10:35:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/07/07/whats_so_special_about_ribose.php While we're on the topic of hydrogen bonds and computations, there's a paper coming out in JACS that attempts to answer an old question. Why, exactly, does every living thing on earth use so much ribose? It's the absolute, unchanging... 73971@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-07-07T10:42:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/06/22/genzymes_virus_problems.php We organic chemists have it easy compared to the cell culture people. After all, our reactions aren't alive. If we cool them down, they slow down, and if we heat them up, they'll often pick up where they left off.... 73944@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-06-22T07:23:30-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/05/13/exercise_and_vitamins_now_wait_a_minute_.php Now, this is an example of an idea being followed through to its logical conclusion. Here’s where we start: the good effects of exercise are well known, and seem to be beyond argument. Among these are marked improvements in insulin... 73866@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-05-13T07:20:42-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/05/01/niacin_no_longer_redfaced.php One of Merck’s less wonderful recent experiences was the rejection of Cordaptive, which was an attempt to make a niacin combination for the cardiovascular market. Niacin would actually be a pretty good drug to improve lipid profiles if people could... 73853@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2009-05-01T07:26:45-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/04/29/no_magic_involved.php What a mess! Science has a retraction of a 2005 paper, which is always a nasty enough business, but in this case, the authors can’t agree on whether it should be retracted or not. And no one seems to be... 73848@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Dark Side 2009-04-29T07:37:07-05:00