Telomeres: Telling Tails
Telomeres protect chromosome ends and help stabilize the genome. Throughout human life and in aging, telomeres often erode down, eventually causing cells to malfunction or die. The highly regulated cellular enzyme telomerase adds telomeric DNA to tel....
More details | Watch nowIon Channels: Their Discovery, their Function and their Role in Diseases
The concept of bioelectricity emerged in the late 18th century, based on the experiments of Galvani and Volta. Sixty years ago, Hodgkin and Huxley showed that the nerve impulse is a result of permeability changes of the nerve membrane. This raised th....
More details | Watch nowThe Origin of Reversible Protein Phosphorylation as a Regulatory Mechanism
Reversible protein phosphorylation can be considered one of the most prevalent mechanism by which eukaryotic cellular events are regulated. It is directly involved in numerous pathological conditions, and bacterial and viral diseases. This process wa....
More details | Watch nowFinding Mutations that Affect Immunity
Beginning with an exception to normal function caused by a genetic aberration, one may hope to find at least one protein with non-redundant function in a certain biological process. This approach permitted the identification of the receptor for bacte....
More details | Watch nowTickling Worms – Surprises from Basic Research
Research, at least my research, has never been linear. I have found that my lab and I often double back on problems after years of inactivity or go off in entirely new directions as dictated by the work and people's interests This lack of direction r....
More details | Watch nowMolecules Against Cancer or for Long-Term Memory Storage
For cancer diagnosis and therapy, we are developing activatable cell penetrating peptides (ACPPs), synthetic molecules with a novel amplifying mechanism for homing to diseased tissues. ACPPs are polycationic cell penetrating peptides whose cellular u....
More details | Watch nowAre We Going to Cure all Diseases and at What Price?
We are exiting the era where our approach to treatment of these and many other diseases is 'one size fits all', and enter a new era of 'personalized medicine' where we shall tailor the treatment according to the patient's molecular/mutational profile....
More details | Watch nowRoles of the Ubiquitin System in Health and Disease
The selective degradation of many short-lived proteins in eukaryotic cells is carried out by the ubiquitin-mediated proteolytic system. In this pathway, proteins are targeted for degradation by covalent ligation to ubiquitin, a highly conserved small....
More details | Watch nowStructural Aspects of Protease Control in Health and Disease
This lecture starts out with a very brief review of the history of protein crystallography and continue with our studies since 1970 on proteolytic enzymes and their control. Proteolytic enzymes catalyse a very simple chemical reaction, the hydrolytic....
More details | Watch nowHIV, a Discovery Highlighting the Global Benefit of Translational Research
The fantastic progress made in medicine led the scientific community to hope about the complete eradication of infectious diseases in the middle of the 20th century. The sudden emergence of AIDS in the early 80's cruelly reminded us that this dream ....
More details | Watch nowProgrammed Cell Death in Development and Disease
Programmed cell death (often referred to as apoptosis) is a normal feature of animal development and tissue homeostasis. The misregulation of cell death has been implicated in a diversity of human disorders, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, he....
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