Lab News & Scientific Highlights

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In cold water

Health Innovation Medical Science Biology

Martin Ostermaier wanted to break out of the comfort zone of science. Now, instead of pipettes, the biochemist is dealing with investors and patent law.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.
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A three-dimensional movie of structural changes in bacteriorhodopsin

Snapshots of bacteriorhodopsinBacteriorhodopsin is a membrane protein that harvests the energy content from light to transport protons out of the cell against a transmembrane potential. Nango et al. used timeresolved serial femtosecond crystallography at an x-ray free electron laser to provide 13 structural snapshots of the conformational changes that occur in the nanoseconds to milliseconds after photoactivation. These changes begin at the active site, propagate toward the extracellular side of the protein, and mediate internal protonation exchanges that achieve proton transport.

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Catching proteins in the act

Media Releases Large Research Facilities SwissFEL Biology Health Innovation

Proteins are indispensable building blocks of life. They play a vital role in many biological processes. Researchers have now been able to show how the ultrafast processes by which proteins do their work can be studied with free-electron X-ray lasers such as SwissFEL at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. Free-electron X-ray lasers generate extremely short and intense pulses of X-ray light. Currently there are just two such facilities in operation, worldwide. The results were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.

To starve a tumour

Health Innovation Biology

PSI researcher Kurt Ballmer-Hofer is concerned with the question of how tumours could be starved by preventing the development of blood vessels. After 40 years of research that yielded many fundamental insights about the formation of blood vessels, one of the key molecules has been found; further research is expected to enable clinical applications.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.

Centriolar CPAP/SAS-4 Imparts Slow Processive Microtubule Growth

Centrioles are fundamental and evolutionarily conserved microtubule-based organelles whose assembly is characterized by microtubule growth rates that are orders of magnitude slower than those of cytoplasmic microtubules. Here, we bring together crystallographic, biophysical, and reconstitution assays to demonstrate that the human centriolar protein CPAP (SAS-4 in worms and flies) binds and "caps" microtubule plus ends by associating with a site of β-tubulin engaged in longitudinal tubulin-tubulin interactions.

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Probing what sets the heart racing

Media Releases Biology Health Innovation Medical Science

New insights into the workings of important drug receptorsMany medical drugs operate on specific receptors located in the outer walls of our body’s cells. One of these is called the beta-1 adrenergic receptor. Among other things, it is responsible for palpitation, the racing pulse that we feel with stage fright or infatuation. How it transmits signals to the cellular interior can now be revealed in detail. These findings could help scientists better understand many drugs' mode of action.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.

New details of the transmission of stimuli in living organisms unveiled

Media Releases Biology Health Innovation Medical Science

Researchers unveil new details of how cells in a living organism process stimuli. So-called G-proteins, which help conduct external stimuli that reach a cell into its interior, play a central role here. For the first time, the study shows which parts of the G-proteins are vital for their function. Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, ETH Zurich, the pharmaceutical company Roche and the British MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology report their results in the journals Nature and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.
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Together, not alone

Research Using Synchrotron Light Large Research Facilities SwissFEL Health Innovation

Decoding biomolecules at SwissFEL and SLSProteins are a coveted but stubborn research object. A method developed for x-ray free-electron lasers and PSI’s future SwissFEL should now help researchers to make good headway in this field. It involves x-raying many small, identical protein samples consecutively at short intervals, thereby avoiding the main problem that protein research has faced thus far: producing samples in a sufficient size.

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Ceci est un texte de l'archive des communiqués de presse du PSI. Le contenu peut être obsolète.