New Protein Development May Hold the Key to New Disease Therapeutics
Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - 16:01
in Biology & Nature
The 2016 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded the for discoveries of mechanisms of autophagy, a cellular process much like recycling, where new cellular components are generated from old and damaged ones. Though a relatively simple process conceptually, autophagy plays an important role in many physiological processes and genes essential to the process could be a key component for treating diseases. Now, researchers have reported the first bacterial creation and functional analysis of a protein essential to initiate autophagy: a human homologous gene of Beclin-1. The researchers will present their findings during the Biophysical Society meeting, Feb. 11-15, 2017.