Category: Nanodot

from the "let's-build-better-tools-for-thought" dept.
The results are in for the final stage of the Software Carpentry open source software design competition. The design paper for Roundup, an issue tracking and discussion tool which is part of the plans for Engines of Creation 2000 phase 4, was chosen as the winner of the "issue tracking" category of the competition. Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee is the creator of Roundup, which Foresight plans to use for serious discussion.

from the poke-it-again-Sam dept.
Researchers have written 0.8 nm (presumably diameter) conductive marks in a thin organic film with an STM. The marks were stable for at least the 2 hour scanning session. They attribute the marks to polymerisation of the film under the STM tip.

from the Pocket-Change dept.

Researchers have obtained the most detailed images yet of catalytic site of the ribosome, the factory where amino acids are linked into chainlike proteins.

In two articles published in the 11 August 2000 issue of Science, researchers led by Thomas A. Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Yale University, report that they have obtained the atomic structure of the 50S subunit of the ribosome at a resolution of 2.4 Ångströms.

A press release describes the studies of the basic structure of the ribosome, which includes the first unequivocal proof that the ribosome is a ribozyme, an RNA enzyme.

from the Cutting-the-gordian-knot dept.

Custom-engineered proteins have long been seen as one possible route to molecular nanotechnology. But the challenge of understanding how and why protein molecules assume the shapes they do to perform their structural and functional roles, has been an enduring problem in the field of protein engineering.

A press release describes work that apparently explains at least some aspects of protein structure by working from first principles. "We have discovered a simple explanation, based solely on principles of geometry, for the protein's preference for the helix as a major component of its overall structure," says Jayanth R. Banavar, professor of physics at Penn State and a member of the team of U.S. and Italian research physicists that made the discovery. The work was also reported in the 20 July 2000 issue of the journal Nature.

from the Do-not-go-gently dept.

Preventing damage by ice crystals is one of the major challenges to successful cryopreservation of humans and other organisms. But it's known that some relatively large animals do survive freezing.

A press release describes work by researchers from Queen's University and the University of Alberta who have "gleaned the precise structure of winter protection proteins derived from insects." The antifreeze proteins were found to be up to 100 times more powerful than similar proteins found in fish.

from the Reverse-engineering-3billion-years-of-R&D dept.

The translation of DNA/RNA instructions and the synthesis of proteins is arguably the most complex single-site operation carried out by biological systems at the molecular level, and it's done by relatively huge molecular machines called ribosomes. Insight into the operation of these naturally evolved molecular assembly devices could be invaluable to the design of artificial molecular machines.

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reported in the 20 July 2000 issue of the journal Nature that they have have "detected a ratcheting rotation deep inside the cell's tiny protein-making 'factory' at a key point in the protein construction process." An overview of their work, as well as some animations of ribosome operation, appear on the HHMI web site.