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Nature Abhors a Vacuum
Scientists from Columbia University have evidence that Nature's policy toward the vacuums it supposedly abhors may be more flexible than is generally appreciated. In the course of trying to predict the binding energy between receptors and their ligands, the authors found that under certain circumstances, regions of a binding pocket can be so hydrophobic that even when there is no ligand bound to it, water molecules do not fill them. Instead, a void is formed when there is no ligand bound. The authors found enough examples of such structures that they believe "such regions may represent a general motif for molecular recognition between the dry region in the receptor and the hydrophobic groups in the ligands." The work is part of a larger attempt to predict binding energies through a strategy called WaterMap. It appeared in the Jan. 4, 2011, online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cancer Can be Due to One Smash Hit
Most cancer cells seem to result from a series of unfortunate events that, in their totality, leave cells with too much genome damage to function normally. But researchers from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge reported this week that there also appear to be events that are the cellular equivalent of a meteor hit: A few percent of all cancers u and about a quarter of bone cancers u seem to be due to genomic damage that results from a single massive assault on the cellular genome. The …
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