(credit: CDC/ James Gathany)
The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first human trial of an experimental Zika vaccine, according to a joint announcement by the two companies behind the new therapy.
The companies, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Pennsylvania, and GeneOne Life Science, Inc., based in South Korea, said that their DNA-based vaccine...
The interaction of myosin with actin filaments is the central feature of muscle contraction and cargo movement along actin filaments of the cytoskeleton. The energy for these movements is generated during a complex mechanochemical reaction cycle. Crystal structures of myosin in different states have provided important structural insights into the myosin motor cycle when myosin is detached from F-actin. The difficulty of obtaining diffracting...
This early morning view of the inner wall of Gale Crater is ethereal. (credit: NASA)
People like Elon Musk and others in the "space settlement" camp believe NASA and the US space industry should colonize Mars and make homo sapiens a multi-planet species. Musk wants SpaceX to one day send colonists to Mars, while NASA is talking...
In eukaryotic transcription initiation, a large multi-subunit pre-initiation complex (PIC) that assembles at the core promoter is required for the opening of the duplex DNA and identification of the start site for transcription by RNA polymerase II. Here we use cryo-electron microscropy (cryo-EM) to determine near-atomic resolution structures of the human PIC in a closed state (engaged with duplex DNA), an open state (engaged with...
The early stages of human development are normally hidden within the womb, but improved techniques for culturing embryos from the blastocyst stage promise to make these steps easier to investigate.
Nature doi: 10.1038/nature17894
ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporters play critical roles in maintaining sterol balance in higher eukaryotes. The ABCG5/ABCG8 heterodimer (G5G8) mediates excretion of neutral sterols in liver and intestines. Mutations disrupting G5G8 cause sitosterolaemia, a disorder characterized by sterol accumulation and premature atherosclerosis. Here we use crystallization in lipid bilayers to determine the X-ray structure of human G5G8 in a nucleotide-free state at 3.9 Å resolution,...
Humans are distinguished from the other living apes in having larger brains and an unusual life history that combines high reproductive output with slow childhood growth and exceptional longevity. This suite of derived traits suggests major changes in energy expenditure and allocation in the human lineage, but direct measures of human and ape metabolism are needed to compare evolved energy strategies among hominoids. Here...
Our intestinal microbiota harbours a diverse bacterial community required for our health, sustenance and wellbeing. Intestinal colonization begins at birth and climaxes with the acquisition of two dominant groups of strict anaerobic bacteria belonging to the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes phyla. Culture-independent, genomic approaches have transformed our understanding of the role of the human microbiome in health and many diseases. However, owing to the prevailing...
Our current understanding of immunology was largely defined in laboratory mice, partly because they are inbred and genetically homogeneous, can be genetically manipulated, allow kinetic tissue analyses to be carried out from the onset of disease, and permit the use of tractable disease models. Comparably reductionist experiments are neither technically nor ethically possible in humans. However, there is growing concern that laboratory mice do...
