New research, from a team of scientists in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, has uncovered how our genome keeps the effects of mutations in check. The discovery, published in the journal Cell, explains how new proteins are created, helping to deliver useful insights into the evolution of the human genome. […]
The guardian of the transcriptome
Salt chemosensation in worms linked to human deafness
Transmembrane channel-like (TMC) genes encode a conserved family of predicted membrane proteins in animals. The founding member, human Tmc1, is strongly linked to deafness, being expressed in cochlear hair cells and known to be required for their function. However, the precise molecular function of these proteins has until now been unknown. Marios Chatzigeorgiou, from Bill […]
Architecture of the spliceosome active site
Research in the group of Kiyoshi Nagai in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division has for the first time provided detailed information on the structure and role of proteins at the active site of the spliceosome, which is responsible for the excision of introns from messenger-RNA (mRNA) precursors in the nucleus. The spliceosome is a large […]
Unnatural amino acids and protein modification
Jason Chin is looking at ways in which proteins can be altered to change their properties, which can create new therapeutics, and even give an insight into what’s going on inside living cells. Chem@Cam, page 8.
From Genome to Proteome: BCA Winter Meeting 2012
Report on the BCA Winter Meeting, held at LMB in December. Summary of talks, including Chris Oubridge from Kiyoshi Nagai’s group and Israel Sanchez from Venki Ramakrishnan’s group.
100 years from now: Jason Chin on synthetic biology
LMB’s Jason Chin discusses synthetic biology, and where research will take us in the next 100 years, for the Centenary edition of MRC Network, page 26