The RNA transcripts of virtually all human genes must be processed by one cellular machine: the spliceosome. The mind-boggling array of proteins and RNAs that make up the spliceosome allow it to control how genes are expressed. Many researchers are interested in the dynamic interplay between these components of the spliceosome and how they evolved, likely from a parasitic RNA that invaded eukaryotic cells at around the same time eukaryotic and bacterial cells became distinct from one another approximately two billion years ago.
The spliceosome is also a reason that complex organisms...
The Department of Biochemistry is excited to announce its 2018 undergraduate and graduate student departmental awards and fellowships. These awards and fellowships celebrate talented students in the department and are made possible by generous gifts to the department to fund graduate and undergraduate research.
“We are always honored to have the opportunity to support our best and brightest students,” says department chair Brian Fox. “These awards are a testament to both our talented young scientists and our generous supporters.”
The awards include the Undergraduate Summer...
People who eat a high-fat, high-sugar “Western” diet typically exhibit physiological changes associated with type 2 diabetes. However, not everyone responds the same way to the Western diet; genetics plays a strong role in determining one’s susceptibility to develop diabetes.
In type 2 diabetes, islet cells in the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin and other hormones that control blood glucose (sugar). If left uncontrolled, this leads to dangerously high levels of glucose in the blood that may result in tissue and organ damage and early death.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry will welcome Elizabeth Wright in July as a faculty member and director of the department’s newly established cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) facility.
Wright is an expert in cryo-EM, a technique able to obtain atomic or near-atomic level resolution images of biological molecules by imaging with electrons. It is a burgeoning technology that can help UW–Madison researchers make significant new contributions to many areas of structural biology, including enzymology, virology, cell biology, and medicine.
Think of neurons like cities, which need to be able to transport goods and services throughout themselves. In cities this is done on highways by cargo trucks. In neurons it’s done on microtubules by motor proteins. To direct traffic, cities have signals like lights and road signs, while in neurons these signals are thought to come in the form of post-translational modifications.
Biochemistry professor Mike Cox has received the 5th annual Award for Mentoring Undergraduates in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The award recognizes Cox’s decades-long dedication to expanding opportunities for undergraduates in the Department of Biochemistry.
Biochemistry professor Richard Amasino has been awarded a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Named Professorship. Support for the award is provided by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (VCRGE) with funding from WARF.
“It’s an honor to be recognized with this award,” Amasino says. “Because it’s a university-wide award it is even more humbling to receive it given all of the great faculty at this outstanding university.”
Proteins are an impressive bunch. Starting with amino acids as their basic building blocks, these complex molecules fold into intricate 3D structures and control just about every biological process that keeps us alive.
Phil Romero wants to understand how proteins accomplish that job so that he can eventually apply their power to important problems in medicine, agriculture, chemistry and bioenergy.
“Describing how proteins perform a vast array of biological functions is tremendously challenging for two reasons,” says Romero, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the...
The Department of Biochemistry and Department of Biomolecular Chemistry invite you to the 39th annual Steenbock Symposium on May 29-June 2, 2018. Registration is now open, and early discounted registration ends April 15.
This year’s symposium, entitled “Iron-Sulfur Proteins—Biogenesis, Regulation and Function,” will bring together scientists from across UW–Madison, the country, and the globe to discuss this unique class of proteins.
Patricia Kiley, professor and chair of Biomolecular Chemistry, and John Markley, biochemistry professor and director of the National Magnetic...
Amy Prunuske’s career is a healthy and happy mix of research, teaching, and community outreach — and she credits her time as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biochemistry with helping shape that diverse career.
After earning an undergraduate degree in zoology and doing cancer research in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research on campus, she went to the University of Utah for a Ph.D. in oncological sciences. An interest in the work of biochemistry professor Elizabeth Craig’s laboratory brought her back to the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2007 to 2011.
The Department of Biochemistry has welcomed Amy Betzelberger as its new undergraduate coordinator and advisor.
Betzelberger hails from Illinois and earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from Illinois State University and Ph.D. in plant biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. A postdoc took her to the University of Cape Town in South Africa before returning to the States as the science liaison for Agrible, Inc., an agricultural tech startup, where she worked until joining Biochemistry.
Assistant professor of biochemistry Vatsan Raman was recently named to a list of 44 young researchers featured in Biochemistry’s “Future of Biochemistry” special issue.
“It’s exciting to be invited to be part of this group, but what’s more exciting is that the rest of the researchers in this group are phenomenal,” Raman says. “I know some of them personally and they really cover the entire spectrum of research and represent the next big things in biochemistry. I’m happy to be a part of an amazing group of people that I respect.”
On January 9, 1922, Har Gobind Khorana was born in the small village of Ruipar, India, now part of Pakistan. Today, on what would be his 96th birthday, Khorana is honored by the daily Google doodle for his Nobel Prize-winning work deciphering the genetic code, which takes the information from DNA into RNA and finally proteins and is fundamental to all of biology.
The doodle shows Khorana working in the lab, with a depiction of his work, the alphabet within our RNA, highlighted in Google’s distinctive blue, red, yellow and green.
Coenzyme Q (CoQ) is a vital cog in the body’s energy-producing machinery, a kind of chemical gateway in the conversion of food into cellular fuel. But six decades removed from its discovery, scientists still can’t describe exactly how and when it is made.
Dave Pagliarini, an associate professor of biochemistry, says the list of unknowns is daunting. How does it migrate around in the cell? How does it get used up and replenished? What genes and proteins are responsible for CoQ dysfunction? Why does its presence decline as people age?
In the wild, chimpanzees face any number of dire threats, ranging from poachers to predators to deforestation.
That’s why scientists, investigating an outbreak of respiratory disease in a community of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, were surprised and dismayed to discover that a human “common cold” virus known as rhinovirus C was killing healthy chimps.
“This was an explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” says Tony Goldberg, a professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the senior authors of a...
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