Amino Acid News and Research

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Amino Acid is one of several molecules that join together to form proteins. There are 20 common amino acids found in proteins.

A Molecular Magnifying Glass for Tracking Protein Misfolding in Living Cells

A novel strategy developed at Rice University allows scientists to zoom in on tiny segments of proteins inside living cells, revealing localized environmental changes that could indicate the earliest stages of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer.

15 Sep 2025

PhoBITs Enable Unprecedented Control of Cellular Pathways with Blue Light

Imagine being able to flip a light switch to control disease pathways inside a living cell. A team of visionary researchers at the Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health) is making this dream a reality with their groundbreaking genetic tools known as photo-inducible binary interaction tools, or PhoBITs.

10 Sep 2025

Predicting Protein Metal Binding with New Artificial Intelligence Model

Biologists and computational scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently refined two artificial intelligence (AI) programs originally built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to predict protein shapes.

10 Sep 2025

Tracing Origins of Wnt Signaling Through the Lipocone Superfamily

Researchers have described a large set of previously unrecognized enzymatic domains – named the Lipocone superfamily – and outlined their evolutionary pathway from bacterial defense molecules to key players in human development.

10 Sep 2025

Ancient Plant Protein Unlocks New Strategy for Engineering Disease-Resistant Crops

Researchers led by Ken Shirasu at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have identified an ancient protein that has the potential to help defend plants against tens of thousands of different bacteria and other pathogens.

5 Sep 2025

Novel Fluorescent Reporter Technology Enables Real-Time Visualization of Apoptosis Inside Cells

Cells in our body are programmed to die after a certain period of time-a natural process known as apoptosis or "cell suicide."

4 Sep 2025

AI Tool for Designing Antibiotics from Scratch

In a recent Cell Biomaterials study, University of Pennsylvania researchers offer AMP-Diffusion, a generative AI tool for creating tens of thousands of novel antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) — short strings of amino acids that serve as the building blocks of proteins — with bacteria-killing capability.

3 Sep 2025

Breakthrough Research Reveals Pathway to Early Protein Synthesis

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology's most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ago.

28 Aug 2025

Researchers Decode How Plants Distribute Essential Amino Acids

Plants produce all amino acids essential for human life. This commonly occurs in specialised cell organelles, so-called plastids.

25 Aug 2025

MIT Researchers Unlock the Hidden Features of Protein Language Models

Within the past few years, models that can predict the structure or function of proteins have been widely used for a variety of biological applications, such as identifying drug targets and designing new therapeutic antibodies.

20 Aug 2025

Amino Acids as Key Mediators in the Tumor Immune Dialogue

The tumor microenvironment is not just a site of cancer growth—it is a high-stakes metabolic contest where tumor and immune cells vie for limited resources.

19 Aug 2025

Atomic-Level Models Reveal New Class Of Protein Misfolding

New computer simulations that model every atom of a protein as it folds into its final three-dimensional form support the existence of a recently identified type of protein misfolding.

11 Aug 2025

Small Protein LptM Plays Key Role in Assembling Protective Outer Membrane in Bacteria

Gram-negative bacteria pose a significant threat to global health due to their high resistance to antibiotics compared to that of Gram-positive bacteria.

5 Aug 2025

Small Changes in Brain Enzyme May Have Shaped Modern Human Behavior

The evolutionary success of our species may have hinged on minute changes to our brain biochemistry after we diverged from the lineage leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans about half a million years ago.

5 Aug 2025

Gene-Edited Mosquitoes Block Malaria Transmission

Genetic modification of mosquitoes with the FREP1Q224 allele shows significant promise for malaria elimination, maintaining fitness and reducing infections.

31 Jul 2025

Stability in Proteins Is More Like Lego Than Jenga

Proteins are life's molecular workhorses, doing everything from turning sunlight into food to fighting viruses.

29 Jul 2025

Gene Editing Offers New Hope to Stop Malaria Transmission

Mosquitoes kill more people each year than any other animal. In 2023, the blood-sucking insects infected a reported 263 million people with malaria, leading to nearly 600,000 deaths, 80% of which were children.

24 Jul 2025

Molecular Chatter Between Cells Drives Tumor Growth and Immune Suppression

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has identified a complex chain of molecular chatter by which cancer cells, exploiting ordinary metabolic processes, program one set of noncancerous cells to manipulate another set of such cells to support their growth and survival.

18 Jul 2025

Amino Acids Guide Cell Responses to Drugs Through a Complex Network

Amino acids play a fundamental role in regulating how cells respond to drugs. These molecules, which form proteins, act like bricks that communicate with each other within a structure.

17 Jul 2025

Researchers Uncover Complex Substrate Profile for Enzyme Action

Research on γ-secretase reveals its unique substrate recognition mechanism, offering potential for developing precise therapeutic agents for various diseases.

14 Jul 2025