Category Archives: Biochemistry

Chelsea Clayton, a triple biology, chemistry and biochemistry major at BVU, will be one of 10 students attending an advanced health professions summer program at Des Moines University. / submitted photo

"I am one of two students from the state of Iowa that will be participating in this program," Chelsea says. "The other eight students come from Washington, Nebraska, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, California and Michigan."

This three-week program exposes students to the four advanced clinical degrees offered at DMU. All costs associated with accommodations, transportation and food are covered by DMU.

"Through this program, I will have the opportunity to learn from lectures and presentations in DMU's four clinical areas - osteopathic medicine, podiatric medicine and surgery, physical therapy and physician assistant studies," says Chelsea.

"I will also have the opportunity for hands-on experiences as well as job shadowing doctors and other care providers in the DMU clinic. On top of all that, I will learn how to plan for medical/health professions school and participate in mock interviews to enhance my preparation for medical school. I believe this program will impact my career goals by helping me decide what area of medicine I actually want to go into. It will give me the additional tools I need to get into medical school and accomplish my dream of becoming a doctor."

Chelsea learned of the opportunity from BVU faculty and says her relationships with her professors have had a major impact on her learning and career decisions.

"Aside from being exceptionally well at what they do in the classroom, BVU's professors have also encouraged me outside the classroom and I know that I am more than just 'another student' to them."

"I know that my professors truly care about me, and because of that it has motivated me to accomplish even more than what I would have anywhere else," says Chelsea.

"BVU's facilities and programs have also helped to prepare me for this program. I believe that BVU has one of the nicest science centers I have seen, and the access to the research equipment that BVU has available to students is amazing."

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BVU student selected for DMU health professions program

ISU proposes department name

Pending approval by the Iowa Board of Regents, Iowa State Universitys Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology will be named in honor of the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, in recognition of gifts and commitments to the department totaling more than $12.3 million.

This support includes a $7.5 million commitment announced Thursday to support strategic research initiatives in biomolecular structure.

Also known as structural biology, this scientific field seeks to better understand basic biomolecular function, which can hold the key to unlocking important new discoveries in wide-ranging areas important to human, plant and animal life.

With the regents approval, the new name will be the Roy J. Carver Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

ISU grads give scholarships

Benches, plaques, art, fountains these are typical class gifts. Tangible things you can sit on, gaze upon, drink from.

Cognizant of the growing financial pressures on college students, ISUs class of 2012 opted to leave something different to the alma mater. The class set up an endowment that will fund scholarships for upperclassmen.

Thus far, more than 600 recent graduates have pledged $45,400 to the scholarship fund.

Thats an average of $74 per graduate, said Sarah Johnson, a program manager in the ISU Foundation. And we expect the endowment to grow in the next couple of weeks as student fundraisers finish making contacts with the graduating seniors.

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Around Iowa State University: June 3

Harvard biologists have brought new meaning to the term "fine print" by devising microscopic tiles made of DNA that self-assemble into letters, Chinese characters, emoticons and other shapes.

More than mere doodling, their advance, detailed this week in the journal Nature, could make it easier and cheaper to build tiny DNA devices capable of delivering drugs or aiding the study of biochemistry, scientists said.

"This technique will accelerate the research field of DNA nanotechnology," said Ebbe Sloth Andersen, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark who collaborated on an editorial that accompanied the report.

In its usual role as a warehouse for storing genetic information, DNA helps build humans and hummingbirds, maple trees and meerkats all sorts of complex organisms. But as a building material for machines smaller than the smallest bacterium, it has been tough to control.

Since the early 1980s, engineers have experimented with a variety of approaches to create structures out of DNA, including the use of tiles small bricks woven together out of several strands of DNA that could stick to one another and self-assemble into shapes.

But when researchers tried to construct precisely defined shapes, they ran into trouble, said Peng Yin, a systems biologist at Harvard's Wyss Institute in Boston and senior author of the Nature study. The tiles tended to stick together incorrectly, resulting in incomplete structures.

"People thought this couldn't work," Yin said.

But he and his collaborators pressed on, ultimately designing bricks out of single rather than multiple strands of DNA.

The strands each had four sequences of 10 or 11 bases, which could bind to complementary sequences of 10 or 11 bases on other tiles. If all four sequences on the edges of a tile bind with their matching counterparts on neighboring tiles, the tile assumes a rectangular shape.

The scientists programmed the tiles to stack up in a staggered formation, like a miniature brick wall. Then they created shapes by leaving out tiles at certain locations of their 64-by-103-nanometer "molecular canvas."

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Biologists construct self-assembling tiles of DNA

Public release date: 31-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Abby Robinson abby@innovate.gatech.edu 404-385-3364 Georgia Institute of Technology Research News

On the periodic table of the elements, iron and magnesium are far apart. But new evidence suggests that 3 billion years ago, iron did the chemical work now done by magnesium in helping RNA fold and function properly.

There is considerable evidence that the evolution of life passed through an early stage when RNA played a more central role before DNA and coded proteins appeared. During that time, more than 3 billion years ago, the environment lacked oxygen but had an abundance of soluble iron.

In a new study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology used experiments and numerical calculations to show that iron, in the absence of oxygen, can substitute for magnesium in RNA binding, folding and catalysis. The researchers found that RNA's shape and folding structure remained the same and its functional activity increased when magnesium was replaced by iron in an oxygen-free environment.

"The primary motivation of this work was to understand RNA in plausible early earth conditions and we found that iron could support an array of RNA structures and catalytic functions more diverse than RNA with magnesium," said Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.

The results of the study were published online on May 31, 2012 in the journal PLoS ONE. The study was supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

In addition to Williams, Georgia Tech School of Biology postdoctoral fellow Shreyas Athavale, research scientist Anton Petrov, and professors Roger Wartell and Stephen Harvey, and Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry postdoctoral fellow Chiaolong Hsiao and professor Nicholas Hud also contributed to this work.

Free oxygen gas was almost nonexistent more than 3 billion years ago in the early earth's atmosphere. When oxygen began entering the environment as a product of photosynthesis, it turned the earth's iron to rust, forming massive banded iron formations that are still mined today. The free oxygen produced by advanced organisms caused iron to be toxic, even though it was -- and still is -- a requirement for life.

This environmental transition triggered by the introduction of free oxygen into the atmosphere would have caused a slow, but dramatic, shift in biology that required transformations in biochemical mechanisms and metabolic pathways. The current study provides evidence that this transition may have caused a shift from iron to magnesium for RNA binding, folding and catalysis processes.

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On early Earth, iron may have performed magnesium's RNA folding job

Public release date: 30-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Diana Yates diya@illinois.edu 217-333-5802 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. There is no sentimentality in Robert Switzer's modestly titled new book, "A Family Farm: Life on an Illinois Dairy Farm." Switzer, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Illinois, begins with a quote (from Victor Davis Hanson's own book on farming) that "the American yeoman farmer is doomed," and describes the internal and external forces that led to the demise of his family's farm in northwest Illinois.

The story of the Allison-Switzer farm (named for Switzer's maternal grandparents, who bought the 121-acre property in 1916, and his father and mother, who took it over after her parents retired in 1946) is just one of millions of such stories, Switzer writes.

"In 1900, 42 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms; by 1990 that number had dwindled to less than 2 percent," he says in the book's prologue. This transition occurred largely as a result of economic and technological changes made possible by the aggressively optimistic borrowing, investing and expansion that some farmers were willing to embrace in the latter half of the 20th century. Many other farmers, who had stared down economic catastrophe in the 1920s and '30s, were unwilling to take on new big risks, and their farms generally gave way to the forces favoring consolidation and the mass-production of agricultural commodities. (Watch an audio slide show about the book.)

Switzer's book is not a treatise on the evolution of American farming, however.

"The characters in this story are not statistical stick figures illustrating the decline of a Midwestern family farm," he writes. "They are my family. The details of their lives provide an intimate portrait of a once common way of life, now almost entirely vanished from the American countryside."

This portrait includes details normally left out of family memoirs: his maternal grandmother's hostility to her daughter's intellectual and educational aspirations; his grandfather's recurrent narcolepsy, a lifelong handicap brought on by severe heatstroke suffered while working in the fields as a teenager; Switzer's mother's depression and unhappiness with farm life; and his father's inability to recruit his sons to the profession.

The book also offers an account of the changes that occurred over the 76 years the family owned the farm, from the early days of kerosene lamps, hand milking and horse-drawn plows, to the gradual though never fully realized modernization of equipment and farming techniques.

Switzer begins with the gritty details of his grandparents' daily life. Charlie and Mabel Allison milked their cows twice daily in a drafty barn. They lived in an oversized and poorly insulated farmhouse with no modern conveniences. They grew corn, hay, oats and barley to feed their livestock and themselves. Charlie carted fresh milk to a nearby cheese factory every morning. Mabel kept a vegetable garden and orchard, and canned produce for the winter. The couple raised chickens and sold their eggs.

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Memoir tracks the life, decline and death of a family farm

On a stroll through the UW campus, there's plenty of art to see, from the newly expanded Chazen Museum of Art to galleries within Memorial Union and Union South.

But not all of the university's artistic treasures are in places you might expect. Take the stairwell of the recently renovated Biochemistry Building. There you'll find murals by the renowned American painter John Steuart Curry that are not only fascinating in their own right, but also a testament to a forward-thinking collaboration between the sciences and arts.

Curry, part of a trio of famed regionalists along with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, was invited to the UW in 1936 as artist-in-residence. While such arrangements are now common at schools across the country, Curry's position was the first of its kind in the nation and it was through the College of Agriculture, not the art department.

The 1940s mural The Social Benefits of Biochemical Research dramatically depicts the gains brought by vitamin discoveries and applications by leading UW researchers such as Harry Steenbock.

Sickly children and animals contrast with vibrant, healthy kids and livestock striding forward. Spread over three walls in the octagonal stairwell, the main panel exudes a sincere conviction in human progress and the ability of science to make life better. Additional panels in the stairwell show lush cornstalks waving in the wind and an idyllic farm where roosters, sows, calves and other critters thrive.

A nearby conference room contains more Curry murals, and works by Curry are also in the permanent collections of the Chazen and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Madison masterpieces: John Steuart Curry murals, UW Biochemistry Building