mindlace

In a lovely paper, Geoffrey Grinstein and Ralph Linsker write about synchronous activity in scale-free networks. Scale-free (also known as “small world”) networks have the property that no node is greater than N hops from any other. These gents show that this topology can persist over a node-set of arbitrary size. This handily mitigates a […]

I was reading last week’s science (it’s finals, I’m a little behind). I particularly enjoyed the discussion about Nature’s Rotary Electromotors - (PDF version). While I sort of knew this abstractly, the article really brought home to me that ATP Synthase is a mechanical motor; its rotation smooshes ADP + P (actually PO43-) together and […]

Science had a number of interesing articles in the Dec 24th issue, but one in particular - Toward a Systems Approach to Understanding Plant Cell Walls (full pdf) stood out.
I’m interested in utilizing bacteria to replace other processes, and one relatively simple example is using bacteria that produce cellulose and other polysaccharides to make paper-like sheets […]

Today I discovered that this gent and his lab have just won the Descartes prize for their study of mitochondria. It is quite appealing to see somone winning a major prize for this sort of microbiological work. It is also good to see that eccentricities of dress and character are not barriers to achieving precisely […]

Now that I am a matriculated student, I would like to articulate the purpose of this educational enterprise. The world has recently begun to systemically view microbes as factories. On an individual basis bacteria and other microbes are already widely used for many industrial and research tasks, from providing surfactants and enzymes for detergent to […]

I just finished reading “Gene Order and Dynamic Domains” (from whence the image is taken). It reminded me again how different evolved solutions are from designed ones.
In eukaryotes, DNA is bound into various higher order structures. They start by being bound into nucleosomes and from there form a variety of more complicated structures. Trivially, this […]

In “A Structural Analysis of Eukaryotic Membrane Evolution”, the authors argue that the Nuclear Pore Complex, which is a “gatekeeper molecule” that controls what proteins can make it into and out of the nucleus of a eukaryote, may have originally been a membrane folding protein. Folded membranes are very important to Eukaryotes, who use […]