Folding At Home: Fact of the Day Log

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Folding fact #157
1961 Marshall Nirenberg built a strand of mRNA comprised only of the base uracil. This strand is called "poly-u," and by examining it Nirenberg discovered that UUU is the codon for phenylalanine. This was the first step in cracking the genetic code, which Nirenberg and colleagues succeeded in doing within five years.

UPOV, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, is negotiated in Paris. The goal of the "Convention of Paris" was to make uniform the enactment and enforcement of Plant Breeders' Rights legislation around the world.

 

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Folding fact #158
1962 Watson and Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with Maurice Wilkins. Unfortunately, Rosalind Franklin, whose work greatly contributed to the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, died before this date, and the Nobel Prize rules do not allow a prize to be awarded posthumously.

The planting of high-yield wheat varieties (later known as Green Revolution grains) began in Mexico. The seeds were released by the Mexican Agricultural Program to other countries.

 

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Folding fact #159
1964 The FAO, backed by the U.N. Special Fund, established the Crop Research and Introduction Center at Izanir, Turkey, for the study of germplasm in that region.

 

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Folding fact #160
1965 Scientists noticed that genes conveying antibiotic resistance in bacteria are often carried on small, supernumerary chromosomes called plasmids. This observation led to the classification of the plasmids.

Harris and Watkins successfully fused mouse and human cells.

 

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Folding fact #161
1966 The genetic code was "cracked". Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich Mathaei, and Severo Ochoa demonstrated that a sequence of three nucleotide bases (a codon) determines each of 20 amino acids.

 

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Folding fact #162
1967 Arthur Kornberg conducted a study using one strand of natural viral DNA to assemble 5,300 nucleotide building blocks. Kornberg's Stanford group then synthesized infectious viral DNA.

Mary Weiss and Howard Green took a crucial step in human gene mapping with the publication of a technique for using human cells and mouse cells grown together in one culture. This was called somatic-cell hybridization.

 

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Folding fact #163
1969 Leonard Herzenberg, a geneticist at Stanford, developed the fluorescence-activated cell sorter, which can identify up to 5,000 closely related animal cells.

 

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Folding fact #164
1970 Peter Duesberg and Peter Vogt, virologists at UCSF, discovered the first oncogene in a virus. This SRC gene has since been implicated in many human cancers.

Howard Temin and David Baltimore, working independently, first isolated "reverse transcriptase" a restriction enzyme that cuts DNA molecules at specific sites. Their work described how viral RNA that infects a host bacteria uses this enzyme to integrate its message into the host's DNA. This discovery allowed scientists to create clones and observe their function.

Torbjorn Caspersson, L. Zech, and other colleagues in Sweden, published the first method for staining human or other mammalian chromosomes in such a way that banding patterns appear, like those Painter found in the giant chromosomes of fruit flies nearly 40 years earlier.

 

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Folding fact #165
1972 Immunologist Hugh McDevitt, in an article in Science, reported observing genes that control immune responses to foreign substances. His observations suggested predictable, inherited susceptibility to some diseases.

Paul Berg isolated and employed a restriction enzyme to cut DNA. Berg used ligase to paste two DNA strands together to form a hybrid circular molecule. This was the first recombinant DNA molecule.

The first successful DNA cloning experiments were performed in California.

In a letter to Science, Stanford biochemist Paul Berg and others called for the National Institutes of Health to enact guidelines for DNA splicing. Their letter recommended that scientists stop doing certain types of recombinant DNA experiments until questions of safety could be addressed. This letter was provoked by experiments planned by Berg, which had drawn vocal concern from the scientific community. Their concerns eventually led to the 1975 Asilomar Conference

 

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Folding fact #166
1973 Scientists for the first time successfully transferred deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) from one life form into another. Stanley Cohen and Annie Chang of Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of UCSF "spliced" sections of viral DNA and bacterial DNA with the same restriction enzyme, creating a plasmid with dual antibiotic resistance. They then spliced this recombinant DNA molecule into the DNA of a bacteria, thereby producing the first recombinant DNA organism.

Bruce Ames, a biochemist at UC Berkeley, developed a test to identify chemicals that damage DNA. The Ames Test becomes a widely used method to identify carcinogenic substances.

The first human-gene mapping conference took place. The conference was inspired primarily by the rapid development in mapping by somatic-cell hybridization.

 

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Folding fact #167
1974 The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper by Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen and UCSF biochemist Herbert Boyer in which they demonstrated the expression of a foreign gene implanted in bacteria by recombinant DNA methods. Cohen and Boyer showed that DNA can be cut with restriction enzymes and reproduced by inserting the recombinant DNA into Escherichia coli.

 

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Folding fact #168
1975 A moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments was called for at an international meeting at Asilomar, California, where scientists urged the government to adopt guidelines regulating recombinant DNA experimentation. The scientists insisted on the development of "safe" bacteria and plasmids that could not escape from the laboratory.

Kohler and Milstein fused cells together to produce monoclonal antibodies.

 

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Folding fact #169
1976 Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson founded Genentech, Inc., a biotechnology company dedicated to developing and marketing products based on recombinant DNA technology.

J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, virologists at UCSF, showed that oncogenes appear on animal chromosomes, and alterations in their structure or expression can result in cancerous growth.

The NIH released the first guidelines for recombinant DNA experimentation. The guidelines restricted many categories of experiments.

 

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Folding fact #0
The first molecular mechanics implementations date to the 1940's, but only in the late 1960s/early 1970s did the availability of digital computers made such calculations tractable.

 

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Folding fact #1
In 1969 Cyrus Levinthal introduced the concept, later to be known as Levinthal Paradox, that a protein cannot find its native state by a random search through all its possible conformations, because such an exhaustive enumeration in theory would require eons of years, while proteins fold on a fraction of second.

 

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Folding fact #2
The International Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 to sequence all three billion bases in human DNA. The public consortium has contributions from many parts of the world. In 1998 a competing private enterprise led by Celera Genomics entered the race. A first milestone was reached in December 1999 when 97 percent of the second smallest chromosome, number 22, was sequenced by the public consortium. Chromosome 21, the smallest and best known with association with Down's syndrome, was mapped soon after.

 

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Folding fact #3
Drugs made famous by computer modeling and analysis include HIV-protease inhibitors (AIDS treatments), thrombin inhibitors (for blood coagulation and clotting diseases), neuropeptide inhibitors (for blocking the pain signals resulting from migraines) and PDE-5 inhibitors (commonly known as Viagra for treating impotence by blocking chemical reaction which controls muscle relaxation and resulting blood flow rate).

 

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Folding fact #4
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) devised in 1985 by Kary Mullis (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1993 in chemistry) made possible the amplication of small parent DNA sequences exponentially in a very short time. PCR technology,besides saving thousands of lives, also made possible the isolation of gene fragments that could be cloned and be inserted into viruses and bacterial cells to direct the synthesis of biologically active products. Thus the field of bioengineering was born.

 

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Folding fact #5
DNA is now being used for genetic surveys in combination with archaelogical data to identify markers in human populations. Such analysis can discern ancestors of human origins, migration patterns, and other historical events. The evolutionary metamorphosis of whales has recently being unraveled by the study of fossil material combined with DNA analysis from living whales.

 

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Folding fact #6
Tryptophan is the largest amino acid. Chemically, it looks like this:
Picture- Click Here
People know about Trp since it's what makes you sleepy when you eat lots of Turkey. Trp is also really important in proteins since it is a very large, hydrophobic amino acid. Finally, Trp's are great molecular signalers which can be used to detect whether a protein has folded experimentally.

 

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Folding fact #7
An underlying principle in molecular mechanics is tha cumulative physical forces can be used to describe molecular geometries and energies. The spatial conformation ultimately obtained is then a natural adjustment of geometry to minimize the total internal energy. A molecule is considered as a collection of masses centered at the nuclei (atoms) connected by springs (bonds); in response to inter and intramolecular forces, the molecule stretches, bends, and rotates about those bonds.

 

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Arginine is an amino acid. Chemically, it looks like this:

Click Here (Picture)

It is a charged amino acid, with a long hydrocarbon tail. The tail is a little hydrophobic, but the charge is definitely water loving.

 

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Folding fact #9
The Invention of Microprocessor: The integrated chip greatly improved the use for transistors, but it could only do what it was originally programmed to do. One young scientist at Intel, Ted Hoff, thought he could make something better. Instead of an -- albeit complicated -- circuit, this chip was to be an entire mini-computer unto itself. That first chip was called the 4004. It was 1/8" by 1/16" with 2300 transistors etched into the silicon. And all by itself it was as powerful as ENIAC, the early (mammoth at 30 tons!) computer built in 1946.

 

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Folding fact #10
The static view of a biomolecule, as obtained from X-ray crystallography for example - while extremely valuable only provides an average, frozen view of a complex system. Certainly molecules are live entitities, with their atoms continously interacting among themselves and with their environment. Computer simulations could take snapshots of the dynamics of a molecular system in space and time and provide a rich amount of information.

 

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Folding fact #11
A Short History Of The Double Helix: In April 25, 1953, James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick publish a short description of the double helix in the journal Nature. "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material," they write. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who made pioneering X-rays of DNA, are awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their DNA discoveries.