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Amazing Facts

Bacteria Rule the World – Benevolently
August 2, 2006
We should love bacteria, not annihilate them.  Bacteria are our friends, according to Dianne K. Newman of Caltech:1 As a microbiologist, I’m appalled when I go to buy soap or dishwashing detergent, because these days it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t say ‘antibacterial’ on it…. It’s a commonly held fallacy that all bacteria are […]
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Cell Biology

Self-Correcting RNA: Is It a Missing Link?
July 28, 2006
A team of Russian scientists at Rutgers discovered a remarkable phenomenon: RNA that proofreads itself during its own synthesis.  The work was reported in Science1: “We show that during transcription elongation, the hydrolytic reaction stimulated by misincorporated nucleotides proofreads most of the misincorporation events and thus serves as an intrinsic mechanism of transcription fidelity.”  It […]
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Cell Biology

Cell Backup Systems Challenge Evolution, Show Design Principles
July 21, 2006
Has an intelligent design paper been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences?1  Read the abstract and decide whether this research supports Darwinism or design: Functional redundancies, generated by gene duplications, are highly widespread throughout all known genomes.  One consequence of these redundancies is a tremendous increase to the robustness of organisms […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Untangles Its Own DNA
July 17, 2006
DNA is packed like spaghetti in a basketball (07/28/2004), but must constantly be accessed by transcribers, duplicators and other molecular machines.  Scientists at the Karolinska Institute, according to EurekAlert, have found a complex of protein machines that know how to untangle DNA.  Machines that can keep DNA from separating too early (cohesins) and keep DNA […]
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Cell Biology

Rubisco “Highly Tuned” for Fixing Atmospheric Carbon
June 22, 2006
Rubisco sounds like a brand of cracker or something, but it’s actually an air cleaner your life depends on.  It’s an enzyme that fixes atmospheric carbon for use by photosynthetic microbes and plants.  In doing so, it sweeps the planet of excess carbon dioxide – the greenhouse gas implicated in discussions of global warming – […]
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Cell Biology

Eukaryote Evolution Proceeded from Complex to Simple
June 9, 2006
As if reprimanding simpletons, three scientists writing in Science1 preached that the old picture of evolution from simple to complex is simplistic.  This is particularly true, they claim, for the story that eukaryotes were born from a blessed union.  “Data from many sources,” they counter, “give no direct evidence that eukaryotes evolved by genome fusion […]
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Amazing Facts

Plant Hula-Hoop Railroads Build Cell Walls
June 9, 2006
Solving a long-standing mystery about how plants build cell walls, Stanford scientists imaged molecular machines traveling along hoop-shaped rings around the inside of the cell.  Publishing in Science, Paradez, Somerville and Ehrhardt proved that cellulose synthase (CESA), a machine that manufactures cellulose composed of six subunits arranged in rosettes, rides like a rail car on […]
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Amazing Facts

Protein Dressing Room Has Electronic Walls
June 7, 2006
Properly folded proteins are essential to all of life.  When a polypeptide, or chain of amino acids, emerges from the ribosome translation factory on its way to becoming a protein, it looks like a useless, shapeless piece of string.  It cannot perform its function till folded into a precise, compact shape particular for its job.  […]
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Cell Biology

Will Genetics Be Neo-Darwinism’s Downfall?
May 4, 2006
The Institute for Creation Research is gearing up for a multi-year GENE project to look for evidence for design (and against evolution) in the genome.  They may not need to work very hard.  Secular scientists, by continuing to find things not all that helpful for neo-Darwinism, are doing yeoman’s work for them.     While […]
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Cell Biology

How Much Can a Cell Do Without?
April 14, 2006
In an old high school game, the leader would call some unsuspecting boy to the front, put a sheet over him, and say, “Take off what you don’t need.”  Perhaps a shoe would emerge from under the sheet.  “Take off something else you don’t need,” the leader would continue, and the volume of giggling in […]
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Cell Biology

Reviewer Stunned by Author’s Handwaving
March 31, 2006
David Nicholls appears to have suffered whiplash from a line in a book he was reviewing in Science,1 Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane (Oxford, 2006).  Though he liked the book in general, he said this about Lane’s explanation for how the first cell got its power generator: The […]
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Cell Biology

Misfolded Proteins Cause Cascade of Harmful Effects
March 12, 2006
Understanding how proteins fold is at the leading edge of scientific research.  Proteins begin as linear chains of amino acids (polypeptides), but end as complex shapes with loops, sheets, bumps, ridges and grooves that are essential to their functions.  If you imagine a string of beads, some with electrical charges, magnets, oil droplets or other […]
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Cell Biology

Introns Stump Evolutionary Theorists
March 9, 2006
This story is not about Enron and Exxon, but about introns and exons.  The proportions of the scandals they are causing in evolutionary theory, however, may be comparable.     Introns are spacers between genes.  For several decades now, it has been a puzzle why they are there, and why a complex machine called a […]
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Amazing Facts

In Praise of Fat
March 6, 2006
Well, great balls of fat.  Cells have spherical globs of lipid (fat) molecules that never had gotten much attention nor respect.  They have been called lipid droplets, oil bodies, fat globules and other names suggesting they were just the beer bellies of the cell.  Not any more.  Scientists have been taking a closer look at […]
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Cell Biology

Precision of Cell Quality Control Described
February 3, 2006
Two research papers in Molecular Cell give more glimpses into the precision of cellular controls to ensure mistakes are detected and weeded out before harm occurs.  Vogel, Bukau and Mayer1 found that the molecular “chaperone” Hsp70 has a “proline switch,” found in all living organisms.  This switch regulates when the polypeptide needing to be folded […]
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