Category Biochemistry

Soumen Basak is an immunologist and virologist at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. He heads the Systems Immunology laboratory there.

He is known for his studies on NF- kappaB, a molecule that controls the activity of a gene.

Dr. Basak did his M.Sc. and PhD in Biochemistry from Calcutta University. He went on to the University of California, San Diego for post-doctoral studies.

He was awarded the National Bioscience Award for Career Development in 2018 and won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in biological sciences the next year.

Dr. Basak is a fellow of all three Indian Science Academies, namely the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

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J.BS Haldane, British scientist known for his work in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics. J.B.S. Haldane, in full John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, (born Nov. 5, 1892, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died Dec. 1, 1964, Bhubaneswar, India), British geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and popularizer of science who opened new paths of research in population genetics and evolution.

Son of the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford (M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932), and the University of London (1933–57). Haldane’s major works include Daedalus (1924), Animal Biology (with British evolutionist Julian Huxley, 1927), The Inequality of Man (1932), The Causes of Evolution (1932), The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938), Science Advances (1947), and The Biochemistry of Genetics (1954). Selected Genetic Papers of J.B.S. Haldane, ed. by Krishna R. Dronamraju, was published in 1990.

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It is commonly believed that art and science lie on opposite ends of a spectrum, but according to Isaac Asimov, the two are interlinked. He once said that scientists can “make great leaps into new realms of knowledge by looking upon the universe with the eyes of artists”.

Asimov was a living example of this connection. A distinguished professor of biochemistry at Boston University, he was also one of the greatest authors of science fiction stories.

His Foundation series, Galactic Empire series and Robot series of novels placed him in the ‘Big Three’ club of science fiction greats, along with Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

Born on January 2, 1920, Asimov came from a Jewish family that moved to the U.S.A. from communist Soviet Union. His parents worked hard at building a new life for their family. They owned a Succession of small stalls that Sold candy, magazines and newspapers.

Asimov used to help out at the stalls and in his spare time cocoon himself in between the books and read the science fiction comics.

He wrote his first story at age 11 and his father encouraged him to try and get it published. Young Asimov took a subway to John W Campbell’s (editor of ‘Astounding Science Fiction’) office in New York and managed to meet him. Although his first story was rejected, Campbell saw potential in young Asimov and encouraged him to keep writing. Asimov never gave up and after many tries sold his first story, ‘Marooned off Vesta’ in 1939.

He went on to write or edit more than 500 books that would enthrall and amaze science fiction fans everywhere. His novelette, ‘Nightfall’ was voted the best science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

He coined the word ‘robotics’ and laid down three rules for robots in his work. They are: 1. – Robots cannot harm humans;

2. – Robots must obey humans except when an order conflicts with the first rule;

3. – A robot may protect his own existence as long as it does not conflict with the first and second rules. His book ‘I Robot’ was made into a successful film by the same name starring Will Smith. Asimov died on April 6 in 1992. This year we commemorate the 30th death anniversary of this great writer.

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Christiane Nusslein-Volhard is a German geneticist, who was the co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her research on the mechanisms of early embryonic development. Christiane Nusslein-Volhard was born in Heyrothsberge, Germany, in 1942. Christiane studied biology at Goethe University in Frankfurt and biochemistry at Eberhard-Karl University, Tubingen, before undertaking graduate studies at the Max Planck Institute.

Upon completing her PhD in genetics in 1973, Chritiane joined the University of Basel. There she undertook gene study on Drosophila, or fruit flies, an important model organism in genetics. In 1978, she joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Christiane and her research partner Eric wieschaus studied the embroyonic development of fruit flies and, around 1980, succeeded in identifying and classifying the 15 genes that direct the cells to form a new fly. Their findings had major implications for our understanding of human reproduction, as well. In 1981 she returned to Tubingen, where she served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology from 1985 to 2015. She won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1991 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis.

Chritiane expanded her research beyond Drosophila to vertebrates. In the early 1990s, she began studying genes that control development in the zebra fish Danio rerio. Her investigations in zebra fish have helped elucidate genes and other cellular substances involved in human development.

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Mimicry, in biology, phenomenon characterized by the superficial resemblance of two or more organisms that are not closely related taxonomically. This resemblance confers an advantage—such as protection from predation—upon one or both organisms by which the organisms deceive the animate agent of natural selection. The agent of selection (which may be, for example, a predator, a symbiont, or the host of a parasite, depending on the type of mimicry encountered) interacts directly with the similar organisms and is deceived by their similarity. This type of natural selection distinguishes mimicry from other types of convergent resemblance that result from the action of other forces of natural selection (e.g., temperature, food habits) on unrelated organisms.

In the most-studied mimetic relationships, the advantage is one-sided, one species (the mimic) gaining advantage from a resemblance to the other (the model). Since the discovery of mimicry in butterflies in the mid-19th century, a great many plants and animals have been found to be mimetic. In many cases the organisms involved belong to the same class, order, or even family, but numerous instances are known of plants mimicking animals and vice versa. Although the best-known examples of mimicry involve similarity of appearance, investigations have disclosed fascinating cases in which the resemblance involves sound, smell, behaviour, and even biochemistry.

Credit : Britannica 

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Astrobiology is the study of the origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This interdisciplinary field requires a comprehensive, integrated understanding of biological, planetary, and cosmic phenomena.

Astrobiology makes use of molecular biology, biophysics, biochemistry, chemistry, astronomy, physical cosmology, exoplanetology and geology to investigate the possibility of life on other worlds and help recognize biospheres that might be different from that on Earth. The origin and early evolution of life is an inseparable part of the discipline of astrobiology. Astrobiology concerns itself with interpretation of existing scientific data, and although speculation is entertained to give context, astrobiology concerns itself primarily with hypotheses that fit firmly into existing scientific theories.

According to research published in August 2015, very large galaxies may be more favorable to the creation and development of habitable planets than such smaller galaxies as the Milky Way. Nonetheless, Earth is the only place in the universe humans know to harbor life. Estimates of habitable zones around other stars, sometimes referred to as “Goldilocks zones,” along with the discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets and new insights into extreme habitats here on Earth, suggest that there may be many more habitable places in the universe than considered possible until very recently.

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Molecular biology, field of science concerned with studying the chemical structures and processes of biological phenomena that involve the basic units of life, molecules. Molecular biology emerged in the 1930s, having developed out of the related fields of biochemistry, genetics, and biophysics; today it remains closely associated with those fields.

Various techniques have been developed for molecular biology, though researchers in the field may also employ methods and techniques native to genetics and other closely associated fields. 

Molecular biology remained a pure science with few practical applications until the 1970s, when certain types of enzymes were discovered that could cut and recombine segments of DNA in the chromosomes of certain bacteria. The resulting recombinant DNA technology became one of the most active branches of molecular biology because it allows the manipulation of the genetic sequences that determine the basic characters of organisms.

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Essentially, mycology is the study of fungi. Here, mycologists directly focus on the taxonomy, genetics, application as well as many other characteristics of this group of organisms.

Fungi are eukaryotic organism which belong to their own kingdom. Until advances in DNA technology, it was assumed that fungi were an offshoot of the plant kingdom. DNA and biochemical analysis has revealed that fungi are a separate lineage of eukaryotes, distinguished by their unique cell wall made of chitin and glucans which often surrounds multinucleated cells. 

A specialized field of mycology is mycotoxicology, or the study of the toxins produced by mushrooms. Typically, a mycotoxicologist has a doctorate degree in biochemistry or organic chemistry, or a medical doctorate with concentrations in mycology and toxins. Fungi produce a variety of chemicals which have toxic effects on all kinds of organisms. Humans have eaten mushrooms since the earliest hunter-gatherers, but many mushrooms remain highly toxic. Other compounds found in mushrooms have potentially beneficial properties which could be used in medicine. Many mycotoxicologists work for pharmaceutical companies, trying to develop new drugs based on these compounds.

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Gertrude B. Elion was an American pharmacologist, who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with George H. Hitchings and Sir James W. Black, for pioneering work in drug development.

Gertrude B. Elion was born in New York City in 1918. She graduated from Hunter College in New York City with the degree in biochemistry in 1937. Unable to obtain graduate research position, she took up jobs as a secretary, a chemistry teacher, and an assistant in a lab. During this time, she pursued graduate studies at night school in the New York University. As she could not devote herself to full-time studies, Elion never received a PhD.

In 1944, she started to work as an assistant (and later became a colleague) to George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company (now GlaxoSmithKline). Elion and Hitchings developed an array of new drugs that were effective against leukemia, auto immune disorders, urinary tract infection, gout, malaria, and viral herpes. They revolutionised the way drugs were being developed. Their unique method involved studying the chemical composition of diseased cells. Rather than relying on trial and error methods, they used the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens (disease causing agents) to design drugs that block viral infections. Elion also discovered treatments to reduce the body’s rejection of foreign tissue in kidney transplants between unrelated donors. In all, Elion developed 45 patents in medicine. In 1991 she was awarded a National Medal of Science and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

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In biochemistry, a Ramachandran plot (also known as a Rama plot, a Ramachandran diagram or a [?,?] plot), originally developed in 1963 by G. N. Ramachandran, C. Ramakrishnan, and V. Sasisekharan, is a way to visualize energetically allowed regions for backbone dihedral angles ? against ? of amino acid residues in protein structure. The figure on the left illustrates the definition of the ? and ? backbone dihedral angles (called ? and ?’ by Ramachandran). The ? angle at the peptide bond is normally 180°, since the partial-double-bond character keeps the peptide planar.

A Ramachandran plot can be used in two somewhat different ways. One is to show in theory which values, or conformations, of the ? and ? angles are possible for an amino-acid residue in a protein (as at top right). A second is to show the empirical distribution of datapoints observed in a single structure in usage for structure validation, or else in a database of many structures. Either case is usually shown against outlines for the theoretically favored regions.

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If the year 2020 taught us anything, it is to serve as a reminder that humanity isn’t all powerful and that we are just a tiny speck in the vast timeline of our universe. For not even in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that a virus would lockdown the majority of humankind at the same time.

The reason for this, as you obviously know, is the coronavirus. The disease might have been named COVID-19 for COronaVIrus Disease 2019, but the pandemic raged through 2020 and shows little signs of abating even now in 2021. This, despite the fact that a mountain load of human resources, on top of huge financial impetus, has been funnelled towards the cause of checking the spread of the disease.

Nature of the problem

In case you, or anyone around you, are wondering why it is taking us so long to find a fix, it is important to remember that that is indeed the nature of this problem. It isn’t the first one confronting us and a look at the poliovirus would illustrate it further.

Poliovirus is the causative agent of polio, a highly infectious disease that can totally paralyse a person in a few hours and is especially lethal against children under the age of five. If you ask the elders at your house, they would tell you that you too were administered a vaccine against the poliovirus as a child.

Our fight against the poliovirus, which is still ongoing, has spanned over decades. From affecting nearly 3,50,000 in over 125 countries even as recently as 1988, the numbers have dropped down to hundreds in the recent years. We have many people to thank along the way… Stanford scientists Hubert Scott Loring and Carlton Everett Schwerdt among them.

Loring’s laboratory

In the fall of 1939, with the world about to be embroiled in World War II, Professor Loring joined the faculty of the Stanford University Chemistry Department. His important research activities here took place in the early and mid-1940s.

Loring’s laboratory was characterised by a friendly atmosphere and subdued excitement. With his students, he was involved in two major areas during this time – the purification of the poliomyelitis virus and the structure and metabolism of ribonucleic acids.

Along with his student Schwerdt, Loring spent three years searching for the poliovirus. Their efforts led to the successful isolation of the Lansing strain of the poliovirus in 1946. Schwerdt completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry by the time their results were announced on January 10, 1947.

Tempers excitement

Loring and Schwerdt were able to obtain the virus with at least 80% purity. They were able to extract it from cotton rats, the only species then known to contract polio other than primates. Even though they had opened the door to further experimentation and the development of a vaccine against polio, Loring tempered the excitement, cautioning that the path ahead might still be long.

They were able to come up with a crude vaccine against polio in cotton rats later in 1947 before Schwerdt switched to the Virus Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. Here, he was able to further improve both his techniques and the product.

Working alongside his colleagues at Berkeley, Schwerdt developed a method to purify the poliovirus and also photographed it for the first time in pure form in 1953. He was involved in crystallising the pure virus in 1955 and also purified all three known major strains of poliovirus in 1957.

Our journey towards a polio-free world continues, even as the COVID-19 pandemic tries to undo some of the great work already achieved. Polio survives among the world’s poorest and marginalised, and the lockdowns and restrictions imposed to curtail the spread of coronavirus has also hindered administering vaccines against polio and other diseases to those who need it.

The work done by Loring, Schwerdt and many others ensured that the polio vaccine was safe when it came about in the 1950s. We will have countless more to thank when effective vaccines against COVID-19 also become a part of our lives.

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Often, during conversations pertaining to heredity, be it with respect to certain mannerisms or behaviour, you might have heard people allude to their DNA. This is because we now know that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, holds the key to heredity to all forms of life and carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms and many viruses.

First isolated by Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869, DNA’s role as the carrier of life’s hereditary data wasn’t known for nearly a century. For, it was only in 1952 that it was firmly established that DNA was the substance that transmits genetic information. That was done through the Hershey-Chase experiment, also often referred to as the blender experiment.

Born in Michigan, the U.S. in 1908, Alfred Day Hershey attended public schools before going on to study B.S. in Bacteriology and doing a Ph.D. in Chemistry. He was drawn towards bacteriology and the biochemistry of life as a graduate student and even his doctoral thesis was on the chemistry of a bacteria. After receiving his Ph.D., Hershey moved into a career of research and teaching.

DNA or protein?

The foundation for the field of molecular biology was laid in the 1940s and the 1950s through research on bacteriophages. Bacteriophages, or simply phages, were known to be viruses – consisting only of DNA surrounded by a protein shell – that infect bacteria.

One of the key questions that was haunting the field was to find out which was the genetic material. The prevalent notion at the time was that it must be a protein, as its structure was complex enough to hold such data. Even though there was some research that pointed at DNA as the possible genetic material, most chemists, physicists and geneticists still held on to the then popular assumption.

Hershey, whose research on phages had provided him with a number of discoveries, set out to conclusively prove that the genetic material in phages was DNA. Along with his assistant Martha Chase, who had recently graduated, Hershey found a way to figure out the role played in replication by each of the phage components.

In experiments conducted in 1951-52, Hershey and Chase used radioactive phosphorus to tag the phage DNA and radioactive sulphur to tag the protein. These tagged phages were then allowed to infect a bacterial culture and begin the process of replication.

Role of blender

This process was interrupted at a crucial moment when the scientists whirled the culture in a blender. This was because Hershey and Chase had been able to determine that a blender produced the right shearing force to tear the phage particles from the bacterial walls, without damaging the bacteria.

Upon examination, it was clear that while the phage DNA had entered the bacterium and forced it to replicate phage particles, the phage protein was still outside, attached to the cell wall. In short, they were able to show that it was DNA, and not protein, that was responsible for communicating genetic information necessary for producing the next generation of phages.

Stimulates research

Hershey and Chase published their results on September 20, 1952. The Hershey-Chase experiment came to be popularly referred to as the blender experiment because of the fact that a simple blender had been used to achieve their test results. These results stimulated research into DNA, and within months, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick published their work establishing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. In fact, Watson wrote in a 1997 memoriam that the Hershey-Chase experiment “made me ever more certain that finding the three-dimensional structure of DNA was biology’s next important objective”. It certainly turned out to be right.

Small in size, big prize

Alfred Hershey shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 with Max Delbruck, a physicist who did research in the U.S. after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937, and Salvador Edward Luria, a biologist and physician from Italy who fled to France in 1938 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1940. They received the Noble Prize for their contributions to molecular biology and their work on bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria.
Working independently, Hershey and Luria showed the occurrence of spontaneous mutation in bacteriophages and the host in 1945.
In the next year, Hershey and Delbruck separately discovered the occurrence of genetic recombination in phages. This showed that when different strains of phages infect the same bacterial cell, they can exchange or combine genetic material.
The three men turned out to be collaborators, despite the fact that they never worked together in the same laboratory.
They encouraged each other in their phage research by sharing results through correspondence and conversations.

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I am a student of F.Y.B.Sc. with microbiology, biochemistry and nutrition. But I’m interested in geology. Is it possible to do any M.Sc. in Geology? If not, should I go for a double degree with geology? Or is it better to waste this year and again start my degree with geology?

Generally, eligibility for M.Sc. Geology is B.Sc. (Hons. Geology)/ B.Sc. with Geology as a subject along with any two science subjects like Physics/Chemistry/Botany/Zoology/Environmental Science/Mathematics.

However, the rules for admission vary from university to university/institutes. Some institutes even require maths in 10+2 level. The percentage of mark requirement also varies from different universities. Most of these universities carry out their own entrance exam to select candidates. So it is better to check the entry requirements for the institutes where you want to apply.

If a dual degree is available in your college, then you may go for it. But make sure that this degree satisfies eligibility requirement for a higher education in Geology.

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