Showing papers in "Current Opinion in Chemical Biology in 2005"

TL;DR: Carbon nanotubes have emerged as a new alternative and efficient tool for transporting and translocating therapeutic molecules and hold great potential in the field of nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine.

TL;DR: Combinatorial approaches are increasingly applied in the design of robust immobilised enzymes by rational combination of fundamental immobilisation techniques or with other relevant technologies to solve specific problems that cannot be solved by one of these basic immobilised techniques.

TL;DR: Theoretical models, fluorescence spectroscopy, small angle scattering and structural biology reveal that metal ions alter the RNA dynamics and folding transition states.

TL;DR: Recent mechanistic advances that highlight structure, catalysis, substrate recognition and interactions with small-molecule effectors for NAD(+)-dependent deacetylases are focused on.

TL;DR: The use of plasmon scatter for long-range immunosensing and macromolecular conformation studies, as well as the ability to Stokes shift plAsmon scatter, a plasMonics phenomenon recently referred to as metal-enhanced fluorescence are discussed.

TL;DR: New metal complexes have been designed that utilize or create open coordination positions for DNA binding and hydrolysis, generate reactive oxygen-containing species or other radicals for DNA oxidation, or perform direct redox reactions with DNA.

TL;DR: A review of the promising advances made in the development and use of protein microarrays to map interactions of proteins with various other molecules, and to identify potential disease biomarkers, especially in the area of cancer biology.

TL;DR: The use of biocatalysts for the industrial synthesis of chemicals has been attracting much attention as an environment-friendly synthetic method, and several microbes with unique catalytic abilities have been found through intensive screening and put to practical use.

TL;DR: This work has shown that catalytic promiscuity - the ability of a single active site to catalyse more than one chemical transformation - has a natural role in evolution and occasionally in biosynthesis of secondary metabolites.

TL;DR: This work focuses on HTS approaches that enable selection from large libraries (>10(6) gene variants) with relatively humble means (i.e. non-robotic systems), and on in vitro compartmentalization in particular.

TL;DR: In this paper, a special focus is given to asymmetric methods applying transition metal or organocatalysts that allow not only the efficient introduction of a broad variety of functional groups but ideally also the flexible construction of various natural-product-like, polycyclic scaffolds from common precursors.

TL;DR: This review compares and contrasts the electronic structures and reactivities of these various oxygen intermediates.

TL;DR: The ability to genetically encode additional amino acids, beyond the common 20, provides a powerful approach for probing protein structure and function both in vitro and in vivo, as well as generating proteins with new or enhanced properties.

TL;DR: Advances have been made in methods for analysis of hydroxyl radical data, so that the large datasets that result from kinetic folding experiments can be analyzed in a semi-automated and quantitative manner.

TL;DR: This review outlines recent developments in electrochemical investigations of proteins adsorbed on electrodes, including demonstration of a special role for Mo(V) in the catalytic cycle of Mo enzymes, quantitation of the catalytical bias in multi-centred enzymes such as mitochondrial Complex I, insight into mechanisms of proton transfer in enzymes, and properties of proteins that are covalently attached directly to a gold surface.

TL;DR: The list of protein-protein inhibitors growing, but the inhibitors themselves are moving closer to treating disease, and recently described compounds have helped to characterize Bcl-2, MDM2 and XIAP as drug targets.

TL;DR: The amalgamation of two of combinatorial chemistry's most attractive concepts--natural product libraries and multicomponent reactions (MCRs)--should provide a powerful tactic for generating libraries of bioactive compounds, but only a few MCRs can deliver functionalized products whose structures closely resemble that of complex polycyclic natural products.

TL;DR: Exploration of dendritic structural space by screening combinatorial libraries of peptide dendrimers for catalytic activity can lead to discovery of functional dendedrimers with enzyme-like properties, in a process mimicking natural selection.

TL;DR: Recent advances in selective, in vivo protein labeling based on small molecule ligand-receptor interactions, intein-mediated processes, and enzyme-catalyzed protein modifications are discussed.

TL;DR: An emerging model for theactive site of group II introns, a closely related class of natural ribozymes, is likely to provide a wealth of insights on structure and function of the active site of the spliceosome.

TL;DR: This review aims to point at alternative reaction types and integrated multi-enzymatic steps that are emerging in large-scale applications.

TL;DR: Molecular modeling revealed how a variety of substrates could be accommodated in the folate-independent cleavage of 3-hydroxyamino acids and shed light on the mechanism of this reaction.

TL;DR: Microorganisms produce an immense variety of natural products with useful biological activities that have a much greater mechanistic diversity than originally anticipated.

TL;DR: The measured redox potentials for a variety of 4Fe-4S cluster-containing glycosylases are remarkably similar, and it is suggested that this property may be used to enhance the activity of these enzymes by facilitating damaged DNA location.

TL;DR: An emerging branch of metalloprotein design and engineering is on the horizon, where unnatural amino acids or non-native metal-containing cofactors are employed in the design andengineering process, and in expanding the repertoire of protein functionalities and thus its range of applications.

TL;DR: Glycosaminoglycans are sulfated biopolymers with rich chemical diversity and complex functions in vivo, contributing to processes ranging from cell growth and neuronal development to viral invasion and neurodegenerative disease.

TL;DR: This review focuses on recent progress in modeling electrostatic interactions in computational protein design, with particular emphasis on continuum models.

TL;DR: As a rapidly maturing technology, SMMs pave the way forward in high-throughput exploration, both in the identification of biologically significant natural and synthetic small molecules and in harnessing their vast potential towards medicinal and diagnostic applications.

TL;DR: The aptamer technology is well-suited to addressing the growing demand for high-throughput analysis and functional validation of potential drug targets and is complementary to genetic knockout or siRNA approaches as it provides highly valuable information at the proteomic level.

TL;DR: There has been considerable progress in the design of proteomimetics: molecules that mimic the structure and function of extended regions of protein surfaces, including porphyrins, calixarenes, alpha-helical mimetics and small molecules.