Category: 2019 Spotlights

“Life began with little bags of garbage,” proposed the physicist Freeman Dyson. “Membranes made of oily scum […] enclosing volumes of dirty water containing miscellaneous garbage.” Billions of years of evolution have shaped cell membranes from simple “bags” into complex and finely-tunable structures. The cell membrane is not just a barrier separating the chaotic extracellular environment from the controlled intracellular space; they allow for the storage of electrical and chemical potential energy, facilitate transport of substances into and out of the cell, and change the cell’s shape according to its biological needs. (more…)

When Greg Bowman presents a slideshow about the proteins he studies, their 3D shapes and folding patterns play out as animations on a big screen. As he describes these molecules, it might be easy to miss the fact that he can’t really see his own presentation, at least not the way the audience does.

Bowman, PhD, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is legally blind. He also now leads one of the largest crowd-sourced computational biology projects in the world. The effort is aimed at understanding how proteins fold into their proper shapes and the structural motions they undergo as they do their jobs keeping the body healthy. Proteins are vital cellular machinery, and understanding how they assemble and function — or malfunction — could shed light on many of the most vexing problems in medical science, from preventing Alzheimer’s disease, to treating cancer, to combating antibiotic resistance. (more…)