Fifty years ago, the group of Tony Mathias and Bob Rabin at University College London deduced the first mechanism for catalysis by an enzyme, ribonuclease [Findlay, D., Herries, D. G., Mathias, A. P., Rabin, B. R., and Ross, C. A. (1961) Nature 190, 781-784]. Here, we celebrate this historic accomplishment by surveying knowledge of enzymology and protein science at that time, facts that led to ...

1897 was a big year for science. J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, which, along with other momentous advances around that time ushered in the golden half-century of modern physics. It was in 1897, too, that Eduard Buchner accidentally observed that yeast juice can convert sucrose to ethanol. This discovery disposed of a firm belief that alcoholic fermentation is a vital operation of an int...

Myoglobin modulates the binding of diatomic molecules to its heme group via hydrogen-bonding and steric interactions with neighboring residues, and is an important benchmark for computational studies of biomolecules. We have performed calculations on the heme binding site and a significant proportion of the protein environment (more than 1000 atoms) using linear-scaling density functional theor...

Nearly 100 years ago Michaelis and Menten published their now classic paper [Michaelis, L., and Menten, M. L. (1913) Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung. Biochem. Z. 49, 333-369] in which they showed that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the concentration of the enzyme-substrate complex predicted by the Michaelis-Menten equation. Because the original text was written in G...

Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI MS) is a versatile analytical technique in glycomics of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). Combined with enzymology, ESI MS is used for assessing changes in disaccharide composition of GAGs biosynthesized under different environmental or physiological conditions. ESI coupled with high-resolution mass analyzers such as a Fourier transform mass spectrometer ...

Peter Geiduschek was an undergraduate Chemistry major at Columbia University and received his Physical Chemistry Ph.D. at Harvard in 1952 for research under the direction of Paul Doty. After short stints teaching chemistry at Yale and the University of Michigan, and an early two-year sabbatical asa US Army draftee, he came to the University of Chicago's Committee on Biophysics, where he was fir...

BACKGROUND Renal transplant recipients (RTR) are regarded as a group especially predisposed to onychomycosis. The exact mechanism of increased frequency of onychomycosis in RTR is however not fully understood. OBJECTIVES This study was undertaken to evaluate activity of hydrolitic enzymes of fungi most commonly causing fungal nail infections in RTR and to compare it with enzymatic activity of...