Posted on July 9, 2009 by BioJobBlogger

Foldit! Who Said Learning Protein Biochemistry Wasn't Fun?

While surfing the web, I came upon a cool website called Foldit. Foldit is an online competitive, interactive protein folding game that showcases the principles and properties of protein biochemistries.

The game, originally created by David Baker, Zoran Popović and David Salesin, works like this. Players are given a ribbon model of a protein made up of amino acids. Players use the cursor to grab, bend, pull, and wiggle the chain of amino acids anywhere along its length, folding the protein into its optimum shape. The only rules are based on physics—opposite charges attract, atomic bonds have limited angles of rotation, and the parts of the molecule that stick to water tend to point outward. The closer your model's properties adhere to those rules, the more points you get. The goal of the game was to get large numbers of players to work on potentially difficult protein folding problems to come up with possible solutions. And it seems to be working. More than 100,000 people have downloaded Foldit since its release in 2008, turning the game into a large, worldwide, multiplayer competition.  

Check out the YouTube Foldit video to learn how it works!

Please visit the Foldit site and blog for more information.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Protein Folding!!!!!!

 

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Posted on June 18, 2008 by BioJobBlogger

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

Does the smell of a fresh pot of coffee brewing get you going in the morning? Do you experience a rush of energy simply by getting a whiff of freshly-brewed joe? If you do, there may be a genetic explanation for it.

A group of scientists at Seoul National University in Korea exposed sleep-deprived rats to coffee bean aroma and then assessed the effects by performing genetic and protein analysis on their brain tissue. These results were compared with those obtained from sleep-deprived rats that were not exposed to coffee. Unstressed, non-coffee exposed and unstressed - coffee exposed rats served as controls in these experiments.

According to results published in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Science, the Korean scientists found that mRNA levels of 11 of 13 genes were elevated in the coffee-exposed rats: the levels of 2 others were decreased. They also found differential expression of proteins (using mass spectroscopy) in the two groups of rats. For example, a protein known to have an antioxidant effect was expressed at higher levels in the coffee-treated group.

So what does this all mean? According to the authors “the roasted coffee bean aroma changes the mRNA and protein expression levels of the rat brain, providing for the first time clues to the potential antioxidant or stress relaxation activities of the coffee bean aroma.” Will these observations hold true for humans? Only time will tell. That said, remember that the best laid plans of mice (rats?) and men often go astray.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (try Starbucks) !!!!!

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Posted on January 14, 2008 by BioJobBlogger

Update on the PEGylation Wars: Schering Plough vs Roche

There are currently two injectable products on the market that are used to treat chronic Hepatitis C infections. Both products, PEG-INTRON (Schering Plough) and Pegasys (Roche) are PEGylated versions of the cytokine interferon-alpha that are used in combination with ribavarin (an orally-delivered small molecule drug) to treat patients infected with Hepatitis C virus.  

PEG-INTRON (peginterferon alpha-2b) was co-developed by Schering Plough and Enzon in the early 1990s and brought to market in 2000. Pegasys (peginterferon alpha-2a) , which use a different chemistry to attach PEG to interferon-alpha, was approved in early 2002 and quickly supplanted PEG-INTRON as a treatment of choice for Hepatitis C infections. Pegasys also gained approval in 2005 to treat chronic Hepatitis B infections.

The knock on PEG-INTRON was that it appeared to lose potency in liquid form (a claim that has always been denied by Schering and Enzon). Nevertheless, PEG-INTRON was supplied to patients as a sterile powder which had to be reconstituted prior to injection. In contrast, Pegasys was supplied in liquid form in pre-filled self injection pens to infected patients. This was possible because the PEG chemistry used to create Pegasys was found to be extremely stable (as compared with PEG-Intron?) in liquid form. Although there appeared to be no real differences in efficacy between PEG-INTRON and Pegasys to treat Hepatitis C infections, patients tended to prefer Pegasys over PEG-INTRON because it was easier and more convenient to use.

Schering Plough has been struggling for the past 5 years or so to recapture the market share that it lost following Pegasys’ introduction in late 2002. To that end, in 2003 the company received FDA approval for a pre-filled injection pen to administer PEG-INTRON. Further, to dispel any rumors regarding PEG-Intron’s efficacy relative to Pegasys, Schering decided to conduct two large head-to-head clinical studies that compared PEG-Intron or Pegasys in combination with ribavarin as treatments for Hepatitis C patients. Today, Schering-Plough announced the results of the first of these two large scale clinical studies called IDEAL. The results from the IDEAL study showed that PEG-Intron was just as effective as Pegasys for treating patients with Hepatitis C. Further, it appeared that fewer patients taking PEG-INTRON relapsed after treatment.

It is not clear whether Schering will win the war but the company certainly appears to have won this most recent skirmish!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (try Schering Plough)!!!!!!!!!

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