Many proteins that accumulate in the form of insoluble aggregates when they are overproduced in Escherichia coli can be rendered soluble by fusing them to E. coli maltose binding protein (MBP), and this will often enable them to fold in to their biologically active conformations. Yet, although it is an excellent solubility enhancer, MBP is not a particularly good affinity tag for protein purifi...

John Locke was born in 1632 and died in 1704, and devoted his working life to a remarkably wide range of interests, quite apart from the philosophical studies for which he is generally remembered. They included such topics as education, the national coinage, colonial administration and, not least, the life-long study of medicine. Indeed, Locke's interest in medicine was so strong that it was no...

Wildberger became a renowned local figure and received an honorary medical doctorate from Jena and many foreign honours. In later life he moved his institute to Forchheim, where he had the assistance of his medically-qualified son before the latter emigrated to America. His writings on the proper training of orthopaedic surgeons, with their insistence on early specialist education in methods an...

A surface plasmon resonance imaging-based Ni(2+)-iminodiacetic acid-coated gold chip system was developed to enable specific detection of a hexahistidine-tagged recombinant protein in crude extracts or in column chromatography fractions. This system is especially advantageous for high-throughput analysis of multiple proteins.

Fluorescent probes are essential for the exploration of protein function, detection of molecular interactions, and conformational changes. The nitrilotriacetic acid derivatives of different chromophores were successfully used for site-selective noncovalent fluorescence labeling of histidine-tagged proteins. All of them, however, suffer from the same drawback--loss of the fluorescence upon bindi...

Affinity tags have become powerful tools from basic biological research to structural and functional proteomics. They were widely used to facilitate the purification and detection of proteins of interest, as well as the separation of protein complexes. Here, we mainly discuss the benefits and drawbacks of several affinity or epitope tags frequently used, including hexahistidine tag, FLAG tag, S...

On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Euler’s birth (on April 15), an attempt is made to bring Euler’s genius to the attention of a broad segment of the educated public. The three stations of his life—Basel, St. Petersburg, and Berlin—are sketched and the principal works identified in more or less chronological order. To convey a flavor of his work and its impact on modern science, a sele...

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 6/20 December 2010 193 11/12 686-689 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2010 www.mja.com.au History Sir William’s grandfather, Edward Osler, was Featherstone (William Osler’s father) and brother whose children scattered to the United States, Sou Australia. Indeed, Harvey Cushing, the contempo neurosurgeon and Osler’s biographer, stated that he h of...

Of twentieth-century physiologists, probably only Pavlov has been subjected to as much historical attention as Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952). In addition to a large number of articles and obituaries, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead, Ragnar Granit, and Judith Swazey have written monographs on Sherrington, and E. G. T. Liddell's Discovery of the reflexes (1960) devoted a great deal of space ...