by Dan on February 6, 2008

In keeping with this week's trend of just science blogging on FAK, let's take a look at another critical protein-protein interaction - this time with the scaffolding protein Paxillin. Specifically, how do FAK and Paxillin (read on...)

by Dan on February 5, 2008

Yesterday, I ended a post about FAK, Pyk2 and regulation of RhoA activity by asking "So, what about Rac regulation by [FAK] and Pyk2?" Today, let's discuss a paper relating FAK/Pyk2 function studies on Rac1: Regulation of (read on...)

by Dan on February 4, 2008

Focal adhesion kinase is an important signaling molecule in integrin-mediated cell signaling and cell adhesion. In FAK genetic knockout (FAK-null) cells, its closely homologous relative proline-rich kinase (Pyk2) is upregulated (read on...)

by Nick on January 31, 2008

You know about adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine. Now get used to SICS and MMO2. In this JACS article published this month, researchers at the Scripps Institute reported the identification of these two artificial bases. They (read on...)

by Dan on January 30, 2008

One of the several popular views regarding the origin of life stems from thermodynamics. Harold Morowitz refers to it as "Metabolism recapitulates biogenesis". In PLoS Biology there's an interesting essay that was submitted (read on...)

by Dan on January 29, 2008

Form follows physics in the fly eye, say Sascha Hilgenfeldt, Sinem Erisken, and Richard Carthew Simple forces, complex shapes: While most biological features appear complex in their geometries and varieties of components, (read on...)

by Dan on January 3, 2008

Here's a comment on work published about 6 months ago that was relevant to me, given my graduate studies on FAK with Jun-Lin Guan. The relations between protein structures and evolution are quite interesting indeed. As more (read on...)

by Dan on January 2, 2008

Two blog posts recently collided for me. First, in a blog discussion on Macroevolution vs. Microevolution, Allen MacNeill clarified some issues for me (thanks to TUIBG for bringing it back up): Add the newly emerging fields of (read on...)

by Dan on December 19, 2007

Amid the political controversy and obstructions to conducting stem cell research, scientists this year managed to turn lead into gold... Genetically manipulating fibroblasts to become ESC(embryonic stem cell)-like sort of sounds (read on...)

by Dan on December 13, 2007

As always, it's these odd conjunctions of things that don't go together that catches the eye. In this case, molecular and sociology. The actual article1 is much more mundane and true to the correct science jargon, and included (read on...)