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'Lego' Approach Thwarts Anthrax Toxin
NewScientist is reporting that scientists have discovered complex nanoscale structures that have successfully protected rats from anthrax. From the article: "The technique relies on using tiny 'peptide' molecules, stuck onto one large molecule, which bind to toxins and prevent them from causing damage. They do this in much the same way that two Lego bricks might fit together - with several studs from the binding molecule slotting into, and so blocking, the sites on a toxin molecule which are needed to cause damage."
That's the way EVERYTHING in biochemistry works!
TFA is light on detail, what a surprise, but I am guessing the novelty here is that you can in some cases get the advantage of multiple-binding cooperativity without having to custom-design the molecular backbone "scaffold" that holds the binding sites in the correct relationship. By just changing the density of peptides on the surface of the liposome, they can more or less continuously "tune" the distance between the binding sites. So, in principle, the advantage to this kind of approach would be that you could rapidly and cheaply create many different antagonists for many different poisons. It's hugely cheaper to just vary the density of peptide binding sites on your liposome than it is to synthesize a whole range of molecular backbones to hold the peptide groups in different arrangements.
Also...a biochemist may want to correct me, but TFA says that these buggers bind toxins "thousands" of time better than free peptides. But to be seriously effective, wouldn't you need hundreds of thousands or even millions of times better binding? After all, you don't want to have to feed your patient as much of the antagonist as they gave these poor rats: 500 mg for a 300 g rat is a dosage of 1.7 grams/kilo of body weight! A normal man (65 kg) would have to have over 100 grams of the stuff injected into him. That's an absurd amount of medicine and is bound to have deleterious side effects.
It's nice to be able to make them to order for formerly untreatable disseases.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's more of a prove of the authors incompetence.
Peptides are certain linked molecules. "Peptide" is an scientific expression for "linked aminoacids", nothing more, nothing less.
Putting it in quotes is as if you put "computer" or "internet" in qoutes. You make obvious your neither part of "the scene" nor have a clue what you're writing about.