Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/serial femtosecond crystallography

  • The Bright Crystal

    …hen be assembled to recreate the initial molecular structure. In this case, the team collected some 4 million snapshots, 293,195 of which included a diffraction pattern. They combined 61% of those (178,875) to produce a final 3D structure at near atomic resolution. By combining thousands of individual diffraction images (top), you can solve a structure. Shown at bottom is the 2.1-angstrom structure of trypanosomal cathepsin-B (Source) …

    Authored by on December 5, 2012

  • Crystallographers of merit

    …B.A. with honors from Somerville College at Oxford University in 1931, then went onto a research fellowship there. She earned her D.Phil. from Cambridge University in 1936, followed by marrying Thomas Hodgkin in 1937. She had 3 children within the next 10 years. Dr. Hodgkin did research using x-ray crystallography to study and clarify large biomolecules and pioneered the use of computers in crystallography. In 1964, she received the Nobel Prize i…

    Authored by on March 7, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • The Women in ‘Modern Men of Science’

    . Meitner, whom we’ve written about before at Double X Science, received her doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna in 1906. She began work at the University of Berlin, studying with Max Planck and beginning a 30-year collaboration with Otto Hahn. Dr. Meitner is known at “the mother of the atomic bomb,” although her true discovery is the physical theory of nuclear fission, built upon many experiments and published in 1939. Unfortu…

    Authored by on April 11, 2013

  • Mental illness, autism, and mass murder, and why Joe Scarborough needs to stop talking

    …vulnerable developmental periods like adolescence and early adulthood. Not only does autism not fit here simply by virtue of its lifelong presence, but also, it’s not something that just kinda shows up when a man turns 24 years old.  The man who destroyed so many lives showed several signs of extreme stress prior to his murderous rampage. Were these stressors the trigger for him? That I cannot say. But I can say that stress does not bring…

    Authored by on July 23, 2012

  • Headlights and beads on a string

    …has evolved to keep DNA both compact and easily accessible. To fully appreciate this, one must consider the scale of this molecular machinery. If placed end-to-end, the DNA found in a single human cell would be approximately 2 meters (6.6 feet) in length. Now imagine having to package the DNA into a compartment within the cell, called the nucleus, that is so small it can only be visualized with the aid of a microscope. Put another way, this is e…

    Authored by on November 9, 2012

  • Depressing genes

    ter all, that’s one of the reasons why scientists are trying to identify risk genes: to design better treatments for those disorders. [Image credit: DNA, public domain image from US govt. Image of Prozac, credit Tom Varco, CC 3.0 license.] [Siobhan Mitchell obtained a Neurobiology Ph.D. at the State University New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She currently works at the…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

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