07-05-2013 | Thomas P. Howard; Sabine Middelhaufe; Karen Moore; Christoph Edner; Dagmara M. Kolak; George N. Taylor; David A. Par ..., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2013

Biofuels are the most immediate, practical solution for mitigating dependence on fossil hydrocarbons, but current biofuels (alcohols and biodiesels) require significant downstream processing and are not fully compatible with modern, mass-market internal combustion engines. Rather, the ideal ...

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16-04-2013 | Karl K. Szpunar; Novall Y. Khan; Daniel L. Schacter, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2013

The recent emergence and popularity of online educational resources brings with it challenges for educators to optimize the dissemination of online content. Here we provide evidence that points toward a solution for the difficulty that students frequently report in sustaining attention to ...

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16-04-2013 | Xuesong Shi; Daniel Herschlag; Pehr A. B. Harbury, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2013

Precisely measuring the ensemble of conformers that a macromolecule populates in solution is highly challenging. Thus, it has been difficult to confirm or falsify the predictions of nanometer-scale dynamical modeling. Here, we apply an X-ray interferometry technique to probe the solution ...

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05-02-2013 | Gary W. Ashley; Jeff Henise; Ralph Reid; Daniel V. Santi, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2013

Many drugs and drug candidates are suboptimal because of short duration of action. For example, peptides and proteins often have serum half-lives of only minutes to hours. One solution to this problem involves conjugation to circulating carriers, such as PEG, that retard kidney filtration and ...

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18-12-2012 | Avihu H. Yona; Yair S. Manor; Rebecca H. Herbst; Gal H. Romano; Amir Mitchell; Martin Kupiec; Yitzhak Pilpel; Orna Dahan, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

Aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes, is a widespread phenomenon found in unicellulars such as yeast, as well as in plants and in mammalians, especially in cancer. Aneuploidy is a genome-scale aberration that imposes a severe burden on the cell, yet under stressful conditions ...

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11-12-2012 | Nouamane Laanait; Miroslav Mihaylov; Binyang Hou; Hao Yu; Petr Vanýsek; Mati Meron; Binhua Lin; Ilan Benjamin; Mark ..., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

Ion distributions play a central role in various settings—from biology, where they mediate the electrostatic interactions between charged biomolecules in solution, to energy storage devices, where they influence the charging properties of supercapacitors. These distributions are determined by ...

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30-10-2012 | Yusuke T. Maeda; Tsvi Tlusty; Albert Libchaber, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

In thermophoresis, with the fluid at rest, suspensions move along a gradient of temperature. In an aqueous solution, a PEG polymer suspension is depleted from the hot region and builds a concentration gradient. In this gradient, DNA polymers of different sizes can be separated. In this work ...

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23-10-2012 | Christopher H. Clegg; Richard Roque; Neal Van Hoeven; Lucy Perrone; Susan L. Baldwin; Joseph A. Rininger; Richard A. ..., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

Extensive preparation is underway to mitigate the next pandemic influenza outbreak. New vaccine technologies intended to supplant egg-based production methods are being developed, with recombinant hemagglutinin (rHA) as the most advanced program for preventing seasonal and avian H5N1 ...

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02-10-2012 | Christos Pliotas; Richard Ward; Emma Branigan; Akiko Rasmussen; Gregor Hagelueken; Hexian Huang; Susan S. Black; Ian ..., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

The heptameric mechanosensitive channel of small conductance (MscS) provides a critical function in Escherichia coli where it opens in response to increased bilayer tension. Three approaches have defined different closed and open structures of the channel, resulting in mutually incompatible ...

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02-10-2012 | Hagen Hofmann; Andrea Soranno; Alessandro Borgia; Klaus Gast; Daniel Nettels; Benjamin Schuler, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2012

The dimensions of unfolded and intrinsically disordered proteins are highly dependent on their amino acid composition and solution conditions, especially salt and denaturant concentration. However, the quantitative implications of this behavior have remained unclear, largely because the ...

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