protein

15 Articles

Blood Tests Could Provide Early Warning Of Alzheimers Disease

March 10, 2026 by 2 Comments

Alzheimer’s disease remains a frustratingly difficult condition to manage for the millions of patients affected worldwide and their families. The cause of the disease is still not properly understood, and by the time memory loss and cognitive decline become apparent, the underlying brain pathology has often been quietly building for decades.

Soon, though it may be possible to diagnose impending Alzheimer’s disease ahead of time, before symptoms have taken hold. New research suggests this could be achieved through a simple blood draw, providing clinicians and patients precious time to manage the condition and plan ahead. Continue reading “Blood Tests Could Provide Early Warning Of Alzheimers Disease” →

Regrowing Teeth Might Not Be Science Fiction Anymore

January 27, 2026 by 36 Comments

The human body is remarkably good at handling repairs. Cut the skin, and the blood will clot over the wound and the healing process begins. Break a bone, and the body will knit it back together as long as you keep it still enough. But teeth? Our adult teeth get damaged all the time, and yet the body has almost no way to repair them at all. Get a bad enough cavity or knock one out, and it’s game over. There’s nothing to be done but replace it.

Finding a way to repair teeth without invasive procedures has long been a holy grail for dental science. A new treatment being developed in Japan could help replace missing teeth in the near future.

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Hackaday Links: November 16, 2025

November 16, 2025 by 14 Comments

We make no claims to be an expert on anything, but we do know that rule number one of working with big, expensive, mission-critical equipment is: Don’t break the big, expensive, mission-critical equipment. Unfortunately, though, that’s just what happened to the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter dish antenna at Goldstone, California. NASA announced the outage this week, but the accident that damaged the dish occurred much earlier, in mid-September. DSS-14, as the antenna is known, is a vital part of the Deep Space Network, which uses huge antennas at three sites (Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra) to stay in touch with satellites and probes from the Moon to the edge of the solar system. The three sites are located roughly 120 degrees apart on the globe, which gives the network full coverage of the sky regardless of the local time.

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MIT Engineers Pioneer Cost-Effective Protein Purification For Cheaper Drugs

June 26, 2023 by 10 Comments

There are a wide variety of protein-based drugs that are used to treat various serious conditions. Insulin is perhaps the most well-known example, which is used for life-saving treatments for diabetes. New antibody treatments also fall into this category, as do various vaccines.

A significant cost element in the production of these treatments is the purification step, wherein the desired protein is separated from the contents of the bioreactor it was produced in. A new nanotech discovery from MIT could revolutionize this area, making these drugs cheaper and easier to produce.

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Broken Genes And Scrambled Proteins: How Radiation Causes Biological Damage

January 24, 2023 by 31 Comments

If decades of cheesy sci-fi and pop culture have taught us anything, it’s that radiation is a universally bad thing that invariably causes the genetic mutations that gifted us with everything from Godzilla to Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. There’s a kernel of truth there, of course. One only needs to look at pictures of what happened to Hiroshima survivors or the first responders at Chernobyl to see extreme examples of what radiation can do to living tissues.

But as is usually the case, a closer look at examples a little further away from the extremes can be instructive, and tell us a little more about how radiation, both ionizing and non-ionizing, can cause damage to biochemical structures and processes. Doing so reveals that, while DNA is certainly in the crosshairs for damage by radiation, it’s not the only target — proteins, carbohydrates, and even the lipids that form the membranes within cells are subject to radiation damage, both directly and indirectly. And the mechanisms underlying all of this end up revealing a lot about how life evolved, as well as being interesting in their own right.

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Illuminating The Inner Workings Of A Venus Flytrap

November 10, 2020 by 12 Comments

As a carnivorous plant, Venus flytraps have always been a fascinating subject of study. One of their many mysteries is how they differentiate an insect visit from less nutritious stimulants such as a windblown pebble. Now scientists are one step closer to deciphering the underlying mechanism, assisted by a new ability to visualize calcium changes in real time.

Calcium has long been suspected to play an important part in a Venus flytrap’s close/no-close decision process, but scientists couldn’t verify their hypothesis before. Standard chemical tests for calcium would require cutting the plant apart, which would only result in a static snapshot. The software analogy would be killing the process for a memory dump but unable to debug the process at runtime. There were tantalizing hints of a biological calcium-based analog computer at work, but mother nature had no reason to evolve JTAG test points on it.

Lacking in-circuit debug headers, scientists turned to the next best thing: add diagnostic indicator lights. But instead of blinking LEDs, genes were added to produce a protein that glows in the presence of calcium. Once successful, they could work with the engineered plants and get visual feedback. Immediately see calcium levels change and propagate in response to various stimuli over different time periods. Confirming that the trap snaps shut only in response to patterns of stimuli that push calcium levels beyond a threshold.

With these glowing proteins in place, researchers found that calcium explained some of the behavior but was not the whole picture. There’s something else, suspected to be a fast electrical network, that senses prey movement and trigger calcium release. That’ll be something to dig into, but at least we have more experience working with electrical impulses and not just for plants, either.

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New Microscope Directly Images Protein Atoms

June 5, 2020 by 27 Comments

There’s an old joke that you can’t trust atoms — they make up everything. But until fairly recently, there was no real way to see individual atoms. You could infer things about them using X-ray crystallography or measure their pull on tiny probes using atomic force microscopes, but not take a direct image. Until now. Two laboratories recently used cryo-electron microscopy to directly image atoms in a protein molecule with a resolution of about 1.2 x 10-7 millimeters or 1.2 ångströms. The previous record was 1.54 ångströms.

Recent improvements in electron beam technology helped, as did a device that ensures electrons that strike the sample travel at nearly the same speeds. The latter technique resulted in images so clear, researchers could identify individual hydrogen atoms in the apoferritin molecule and the water surrounding it.

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