Molecular biology and genetics
How to use technology to teach undegraduate biology
Explanations by Stony Brook U. professor William Collins: it was fun to watch for me.
298. Do all spherical viruses have icosahedral symmetry?
This is a guest post by Eric Lewin Altshuler (UMDNJ, Newark) and Antonio Perez-Garrido (U. of Cartagena). Dmitry.
More than half a century ago Crick and Watson (Nature, 177, 473-475 (1956)) had the ingenious insight that viral capsids must be made of multiple units of the same small number of proteins, lest the viral genome be orders of magnitude too large – if coding for each of the hundreds or thousands of capsid proteins separately – to fit inside its capsid. Caspar and Klug (Cold Spring Harbor Symposia On Quantitative Biology 27, 1 (1962)) made a significant advance in appreciating that the structure of a number of viral capsids had icosahedral symmetry. They described capsids by a number 
(
, 
non-negative integers) having 
subunits arranged into an icosadeltahedral lattice. However, determination of the structure of these large capsids is a tour de force of experimentation, and until recently capsid structure was actually determined by fitting relatively low resolution data to an assumption of an icosadeltahedral capsid (see Strauss, “Viruses and Human Disease”, p. 34, Academic Press, San Diego (2002) and refs. therein.) Recently, though high resolution studies have confirmed icosadeltahedral configurations for 
1, 3 (Cardone et al., Nature 457, 694-698 (2009)) and 7 (Jiang et al., Nature 439 612-616 (2006) and Gertsman et al., Nature doi:10.1038/nature07686) viruses. So do all spherical viruses have icosahedral symmetry?
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248. Nature is not scale-free
Click on the image in order to see larger version.
With thanks to @hugan.
140. First two weeks of December at NEQNET
Dear friends
Before I proceed to the (becoming usual already) list of posts published at NEQNET during the last two weeks, let me say a couple of words about the blog itself, which is currently the source of my pride 
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138. Synthetic biology and iGem: part 2
This is the next (and probably the last – we will see 
) part of my interview with Alexej Skvortsov, the leader of the Russian team in iGem 07, international competition in synthetic biology.
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137. Synthetic biology and iGem: interview
This story is rather long one…
Browsing the web approximately a year ago , I have found an interesting article on wired.com which did show that biology students are considered somewhat more important asset than physics students nowadays – in particular, they are getting taught more effectively and more money is invested in their education (the former, I guess, requires the latter, and yes, Ok, I am jealous )
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97. Second week of November on NEQNET
Physics
* Quintessence on the string theory landscape?
I discuss the recent paper by Kaloper and Sorbo explaining how quintessence can be realized on the string theory landscape, as follows from the title. The post also contains small introduction explaining what is quintessence field and why we want so hard to find it on the landscape
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86. Life cycle of stem cells
Since it is a weekend, I am no longer going to bother you with technical posts, even branes like ours are supposed to have some time to rest Instead reading something (that probably seems rather boring at first sight), why not enjoy the following video of the life cycle of stem cells? When we learned that we are going to have a baby, this video did help us to visualize how Agata is growing (What is presented here is basically the first stage of the human embryon growth.)
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84. Replication DNA in the cell
One of the most important processes that will ever studied by molecular biology is the process of DNA replication – copying a double-spiral DNA molecule in order to form two of them. Since each DNA spiral carries the same genetic information, both new molecules serve as perefect templates for the subsequent reproduction. Just have found a very nice video explanation of this process and wanted to share it with you… Enjoy
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