Major breakthrough in Parkinson’s disease research

The Saint Louis University School of Medicine researchers have announced a major finding that could lead to development of better therapies for one of the most common neurological disorders, Parkinson’s disease.
Dopamine is required for smooth and coordinated function of the body’s muscles and movements. Parkinson’s disease occurs when dopamine producing nerve cells of substantia nigra [...]

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Why DNA pol I is not suited to replicate E. coli chromosome?

As mentioned earlier, DNA pol III is the enzyme which carries out the replication of large E. coli chromosome. DNA pol I, because of the following properties, does not qualify as the enzyme for E. coli chromosome replication:
1) The polymerization rate (nucleotides added/sec) of this enzyme is 16-20 nucleotides/sec or approximately 600 nucleotides/min, which [...]

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Toyota RIN: Truly Amazing Vehicle

The Toyota RIN was unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show with the motto of providing the healthy driving. The car is truly an amazing piece of engineering with ergonomic seats, oxygen-level conditioner, a humidifier, color-changing steering wheel controls, and as the full story here says “it’s compact and green! Literally and figuratively…”.
via: Inhabitat

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A new cancer vaccine on the anvil

A recent finding published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology reports the synthesis of a carbohydrate-based vaccine for cancer. The study carried out in mice demonstrated that the vaccine triggers a strong immune response to cancer cells. The vaccine has been created synthetically and has shown promising results in creating an antibody response that can [...]

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DNA polymerases of E. coli

DNA pol I: It is a single subunit enzyme with a mol wt of 103,000. It has 3′→5′ exonuclease proofreading activity. The polymerization rate, i.e. nucleotides added per second to a growing DNA molecule, is 16-20. The processivity of DNA pol I is 3-200. Processivity is the number of nucleotides before polymerase dissociates from [...]

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DNA Polymerases

The enzyme required for DNA replication is DNA polymerase. All living organisms which have DNA as their genetic material require DNA polymerase enzyme.
We will begin our discussion of DNA polymerases with the E. coli enzymes. This prokaryote has 5 different kinds of DNA polymerase: DNA pol I, DNA pol II, DNA pol III, DNA pol [...]

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Arthur Kornberg, discoverer of DNA polymerase, dies at 89

This post is a tribute to Arthur Kornberg. He died of respiratory failure on Friday in Stanford, California at the age of 89. He discovered the enzyme DNA polymerase, which replicates the DNA molecule. The search for an enzyme that could synthesize DNA started in 1955, which finally culminated in 1959 with a Nobel Prize [...]

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World’s hottest chile pepper is an Indian variety

An Indian chile pepper variety, Bhut Jolokia, originating from Assam has been declared the world’s hottest chile pepper. The vernacular name Bhut Jolokia translates as ‘ghost chile’. The results of the study conducted by Paul W. Bosland and Jit B. Baral were published in the journal HortScience. The Indian variety beat the previous record set [...]

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Retrotransposons and retroposons: Subtle nuances

The transposable elements that transpose via an RNA intermediate are of two kinds: Retrotransposons and retroposons.
1) Retrotransposons: They resemble retroviruses and encode reverse transcriptase enzyme.
2) Retroposons: Neither do they resemble retroviruses nor do they code for their own reverse transcriptase.
Retrotransposons: The genetic information of retroviruses is encoded in RNA, which is transcribed into DNA by [...]

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A green skyscraper in Mumbai, India

I know that this blog is not about the environment and related issues. But occasionally I come across some piece of information about green issues that grabs the attention and I could not suppress the urge to share it. This is one such  example. Mumbai will be getting its, supposed to be greenest, skyscraper soon. [...]

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