Articles by John Hewitt
Phys.org / Where did brains come from?
Charles Darwin wrote a book called "The Power of Movement in Plants" with his son Francis in which they first identified the root apex as the central command center of plants. In contrast to our own orientation with respect ...
Phys.org / How virally derived transposons are domesticated to evolve new forms of life
About half of our genome is made up of transposable elements (TEs), also known as transposons. These 'jumping genes' are short stretches of DNA that have the unique ability to duplicate themselves and change their position ...
Phys.org / Complete characterization of the full mitochondrial kinome
The human cellular kinome contains over 500 kinases, accounting for almost 2% of all our genes. It is currently impossible to gauge the phosphorylation status, or even phosphorylation potential, of the entire proteome of ...
Phys.org / CRISPR editing of mitochondria: Promising new biotech?
Although the CRISPR/Cas9 system has seen widespread application in editing the nuclear genome, using it to edit the mitochondrial genome has been problematic. The main hurdles have been a lack of suitable editing sites in ...
Medical Xpress / Drugging the undruggable, improbable new targets for lung cancer therapy
The growth of solid tumors is frequently driven by mutations in key proto-oncogenes. For non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC), somatic mutations in the KRAS (Kirsten RAt Sarcoma virus) gene turn it into an oncogene that renders ...
Phys.org / Neural activity controls mitochondrial transfer of RNA modifiers to the nucleus
In a recent paper in RNA Biology, researchers show that mitochondria translocate their key RNA methyltransferase enzyme, TRMT1, into host cell nuclei in response to neural activity. This subcellular relocalization of key ...
Medical Xpress / How does SARS-CoV-2 evade our immune defenses?
How does SARS-CoV-2 evade our immune defenses? It's a good question, actually. When SARS-CoV-2 defeats host defenses, we need to know how it does so, and conversely, when host defenses prevail, that also needs to be understood. ...
Medical Xpress / Vaccine wars escalate as new antibody escape variants raise the bar
When a new mutation within the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD) emerges that a particular antibody can no longer neutralyze, it is often called an escape variant. With the rapid identification of these ...
Phys.org / How chromosomes evolve to create new forms of life
3-D printing is a universal process in the sense that pretty much any part that can be drawn up in a CAD program can be printed, at least within a certain resolution. Machining a part on a mill or lathe, while having the ...
Phys.org / 3-D creature construction: Building chromosomes from the ground up
The Genome in a Box project is the brainchild of researchers Anthony Birnie and Cees Dekker from the Dept. of Bionanoscience at the Delft University of Technology. Their stated goal is to assemble a functioning chromosome ...
Medical Xpress / Tumor cells reveal a core syncytial drive to evade host defenses
Toxins, radiation, and normal metabolic processes together generate molecular lesions in every one of our cells to the tune of 10,000 to 1,000,000 hits per day. Fortunately, most of these code faults are immediately patched ...
Medical Xpress / How does SARS-CoV-2 get in your head and destroy your sense of smell?
One of the early indicators of imminent SARS-CoV-2 infection is a sudden and complete loss of smell and taste. Often, these symptoms persist long after infection has been seemingly cleared. How might a virus like this get ...
Medical Xpress / Could NRF2 be your magic molecule for eternal youth?
NRF2 is just one of thousands of critical proteins in the cell, but it is one that we now know a lot about. Once any molecule achieves a certain level of celebrity status, it tends to acquire a groupie following in the supplement ...
Phys.org / Intimate associations between SARS-CoV-2 and mitochondria suggest new angles of attack
As one wise pundit recently observed, "everybody is a virologist now." For the many people whose interest in biology formerly began and ended with "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," a second axiom can now be ...
Medical Xpress / New therapeutic approaches for SARS-CoV-2
Medicine has two things to offer when viral pandemics hit: vaccines and therapeutics. While it is hard to undervalue the noble goal of rapidly developing and rolling out safe vaccines that effectively reduce disease severity, ...
