(Press-News.org) ROCKVILLE, MD – The Biophysical Society is proud to announce its 2024 Society Fellows. This award honors the Society’s distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science and contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics. The Fellows will be honored at the Biophysical Society’s 68th Annual Meeting, being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from February 10-14, 2024. The 2024 Fellows are:
Rommie E. Amaro, University of California, San Diego, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for her work on developing methods to enable the simulation of biological molecules in situ and their applications to illuminate the role of glycans in biology.
Ivet Bahar, Laufer Center, Stony Brook University, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for pioneering novel models and methods in structural and computational biology, including the elastic network models for protein dynamics that helped bridge protein structure and function.
Jennifer A. Doudna, University of California Berkeley and Innovative Genomics Institute, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for her development of a method for genome editing.
Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for his significant contributions to the field of protein biophysics, particularly in integrating computational and experimental methods to study the structure, dynamics, folding and function of proteins.
Gary J. Pielak, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for his biophysical studies on protein structure and dynamics, both in vitro and inside cells, with a particular emphasis on crowding.
Eugene Shakhnovich, Harvard University, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for his work on statistical physics of proteins that illuminated fundamental aspects of folding, design, evolutionary dynamics and complex biological phenomena.
Michelle D. Wang, Cornell University, USA, is named a Biophysical Society Fellow for advancing our understanding of transcription, replication, and chromatin dynamics through the lens of DNA mechanics and topology.
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The Biophysical Society, founded in 1958, is a professional, scientific society established to lead an innovative global community working at the interface of the physical and life sciences, across all levels of complexity, and to foster the dissemination of that knowledge. The Society promotes growth in this expanding field through its Annual Meeting, publications, and outreach activities. Its 7,500 members are located throughout the world, where they teach and conduct research in colleges, universities, laboratories, government agencies, and industry.
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WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a wearable optical device for early detection of hemorrhage during labor or after childbirth. This serious heavy bleeding can be hard to detect before it becomes an emergency and accounts for almost 30% of maternal deaths globally and just over 10% of maternal deaths in the United States.
Studies have shown that early diagnosis and treatment for postpartum hemorrhage is the best way to prevent deaths. The new device is designed to be worn on the wrist, where it uses laser speckle imaging to continuously ...
PORTLAND, Oregon -- The United States’ most distinguished biomedical research award is being given to Oregon Health & Science University physician-scientist David Huang, M.D., Ph.D., for co-inventing an imaging technology that routinely helps prevent blindness and is increasingly used to diagnose and treat conditions of the heart, brain, skin and more.
Huang is receiving the 2023 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award as a co-inventor of optical coherence tomography, or OCT, the Albert and ...
Violence was a consistent part of life among ancient communities of hunter-gatherers, according to a new study co-authored by a Tulane University researcher that looked for signs of trauma on 10,000-year-old skeletal remains from burial sites in northern Chile.
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Archaeological research has shown that interpersonal violence and warfare played an important role in the lives of hunter-gatherer groups over time. Still, many questions remain about the factors that influence such violence. The record of human populations in northern Chile extends across 10,000 years, providing a valuable opportunity to study patterns in violence over time.
John ...
Children are taught to leave wild mushrooms alone because of their potential to be poisonous. But trees on the other hand depend on fungi for their well-being. Look no further than ectomycorrhizal fungi, which are organisms that colonize the roots of many tree species where the boreal ecosystem (zone encompassing Earth’s northernmost forests) and the temperate ecosystem (zone between the tropical and boreal regions) meet. This area features a mix of boreal trees including needle-leaved evergreens and temperate tree species including maple and oak.
Just like a healthy human relationship, trees and fungi work well together because they help one another. When the ectomycorrhizal ...
HOUSTON – (Sept. 21, 2023) – To make a gene-editing tool more precise and easier to control, Rice University engineers split it into two pieces that only come back together when a third small molecule is added.
Researchers in the lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Xue Sherry Gao created a CRISPR-based gene editor designed to target adenine ⎯ one of the four main DNA building blocks ⎯ that remains inactive when disassembled but kicks into gear once the binding molecule is added.
Compared to the intact original, the split editor is more precise and stays active for a narrower window of time, ...
It sounds like magic: photoelectrodes could convert the greenhouse gas CO2 back into methanol or N2 molecules into valuable fertiliser - using only the energy of sunlight. An HZB study has now shown that diamond materials are in principle suitable for such photoelectrodes. By combining X-ray spectroscopic techniques at BESSY II with other measurement methods, Tristan Petit's team has succeeded for the first time in precisely tracking which processes are excited by light as well as the crucial role of the surface of the diamond materials.
At first glance, lab-grown diamond materials ...
Under normal circumstances, tau protein is part of the brain’s infrastructure, important for stabilizing neurons into their proper shapes. But sometimes tau gets knotted up into tangles and turns toxic, injuring brain tissue and causing tauopathies, a group of brain diseases characterized by problems with learning, memory and movement. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common tauopathy, but the group also includes Parkinson’s disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and several rare genetic conditions.
In search of ways to prevent these destructive ...
A study has revealed new details about a key population of immune system cells critical to successful vaccination against the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and New York Genome Center, the current study focused on T cells, which along with B cells, compose the human immune system’s response to invading viruses and bacteria. A subset of T cells, labeled with the surface protein CD8, produce molecules that directly kill infected cells. B cells produce antibody proteins that neutralize and label infected cells for removal from the body.
Without risking ...
Psychological loss can occur when someone loses a job, loses a sense of control or safety or when a spouse dies. Such loss, which erodes well-being and negatively impacts quality of life, may be a common experience but little is known about the molecular process in the brain that occurs because of loss.
New research from the University of Cincinnati explores those mechanisms through a process known as enrichment removal (ER). The study highlights an area of the brain that plays a key role in psychological loss and identifies new molecular targets that may alleviate its impact.
The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
The research was led by Marissa Smail, a ...
Digital Science, a technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, is pleased to announce that Cardiff University has chosen Figshare from Digital Science’s flagship products to enhance its researcher support services, as it continues its work as a leading research institution.
Cardiff University – already excelling in the production of high-quality, innovative research that translates into benefits for the city, Wales and worldwide – has signed a two-year deal to utilize Figshare as its data repository and to form an integral ...