SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich and at the MPI of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden have now drawn a detailed map of human protein interactions. Using a novel mass spectrometric quantification method, the researchers determined the strength of each interaction. "Our data revealed that most interactions are weak, but critical for the structure of the entire network," explains Marco Hein, first author of the study. The paper has now been published in the journal Cell.
Proteins are the building blocks and central protagonists of the cell and contribute to all processes of life at the molecular level. They carry out their tasks by binding to each other and building interaction networks. With the help of quantitative mass spectrometry, scientists can determine precisely which proteins interact with each other. The technology can be described as molecular fishing: One protein is selected as bait. Fishing it out of a complex mixture retrieves all its interaction partners as well, which are then identified by a mass spectrometer. Scientists from Martinsried and Dresden have now analyzed 1,100 such bait proteins in a large-scale project. They mapped a network of over 5,400 proteins, which are connected by 28,000 interactions.
The different interactions have very distinct properties. Some connections are strong and serve a structural role, others are weak and transient, for instance in signal transduction pathways. Measuring the strength of an interaction is very laborious and hence complicated in high throughput studies. Using a novel strategy, the German scientists established a method of estimating the strength of each interaction indirectly. They measure the copy numbers of all proteins in the cell, and quantify the ratio at which each interactor is retrieved along with its corresponding bait protein. The stronger an interaction, the more of an interactor is recovered.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:34PM
Then you're clearly going to have to turn in your geek credentials if you don't appreciate how revolutionary the material is, and if you fail to understand that bringing those properties to bear in the many applications graphene will have is a process with many steps along the way. These stories are about those steps, about that process, and are entirely legitimate as fare for SN. But do filter them out. Retreat fast and far because you will come to see graphene talked about nearly everywhere in science and tech. It's that big.
It's not spam if you're not trying to sell anything. It's not fanboyism if you're not trying to make a fashion or lifestyle statement. Do you similarly despise all the stories about "damn computers" and "faddish programming languages?" Do you tire of endless articles about systemd? Because those things are all spam and fanboyism, too, by your measure. How about gravity? Are you just sick to death of people talking about gravity, with all their snooty particle accelerators trying to figure out why matter has mass? Goddamn scientists, spammers, and fanboys. They're just out trying to grasp more research dollars and sell you crap, right?
You know what? There was actually some decent discussion about that story. I thought it was silly. It struck me as a thinly disguised Kickstarter pitch, which it was. I half-expected Soylentils to tear it apart. But there was a grain of doubt that I might be wrong, that maybe I'm just older and more jaded and that can lead you to undervalue new tech that will come to be important. So I submitted it. It was a slow news day, and where is it written that everything a person submits MUST. BE. SERIOUS. VERY, VERY SERIOUS?
Sounds great. Such as? Submit it.
Sounds great. Such as? Submit it.
Oh, no? Because that's the one big topic in linux kernel development these days that I'm aware of, so you've just blasted away that as a zone interdit for SN discussion topics. Oh well, guess we can't talk about linux kernel development at all until that whole thing sorts itself out. A narrow escape for you, I'm sure, because then you might have had to get off your ass and contribute article submissions to the SN story queue instead of endlessly whining about how others aren't spoon-feeding you the tech interests you have.
That sounds awesome? See? That wasn't so hard, was it? You could have put that into the submit form in SN's "submit a story" page and voila! You would have become a productive contributor to the Soylent community instead of a useless, vituperative termagant.
But try to change it up a bit, OK, pal? Because all you ever talk about is flash storage; somebody could well wonder if you didn't own stock in flash storage companies and you're just trying to spam the Soylent community. Seriously it's tedious. Flash, flash, flash from you all the time. We should dub you the "flasher."
(No, not really. But sometimes it can impart a lesson to reflect a shrew's drivel back at a shrew, replacing one set of keywords with the shrew's. Chew, and digest.)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2015, @06:34PM
Systemd is NOT kernel development. It may submit things to the kernel now and then, but if it was more deeply tied to the kernel, the entire project would have been kicked out and told to go rewrite itself (a stance I agree with, considering how mismatched the mentalities of the freedesktop developers are from the rest of the Linux kernel base). It's also been a topic that has been churned up into bitter bitching that hasn't resulted in much of a positive outcome Even though systemd may be "here to stay" after being force-fed to an unwilling audience, it will not look the same as its current form three years from now.
A quick Google search for the definition of the word "spam" turns up this: "irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients." Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about sales, therefore by that definition, you are spamming esoteric, if not completely irrelevant, articles about graphene. Please hold off until we see the first graphene-printed circuit boards that can be commercially interoperable with copper-and-gold PCBs, or are the first 100% graphene-printed board products. Until then, I will tell all my friends, colleagues, family, and strangers I meet that SoylentNews is a site about graphene, ripping off articles from El Reg and The Grauniad, and pumping up the next tech buzzword bubble.
I already tried to submit an article, about when Mike Snitzer attempted to disable slab merging for all of device-mapper, which then resulted in Linus Torvalds going into a "what the hell are you doing?!" tantrum, as is his trademark, for better or worse. Everyone got their steam out, and realized that yes, disabling slab merging was a bad idea. Here's a quick reprint from the email that touched it off [redhat.com]:
The submission was left off in the dust, probably in preference for approving articles about graphene and articles from The Register.