Congratulations to everyone who got their post selected.
1) Drug-induced side effects resulting from secondary targets are an important limitation in drug development. Indeed, “
one third of potential therapeutic compounds fail in clinical trials or are later removed from the market due to unacceptable side effects often caused by off-target binding”.
Sometimes, however, a compound binding multiple targets or sites (“polypharmacology”) can be an advantage: a single drug could be used for the treatment of two or three different diseases. Also,
The rational design of drugs that act via polypharmacological mechanisms can produce compounds that exhibit increased therapeutic potency and against which resistance is less likely to develop
Thus, having a way to predict and identify secondary targets of known molecules, is something useful. Iddo Friedberg at Byte Size Biology
discusses a recent paper published in
PLoS Computational Biology reporting:
a multidimensional strategy for the identification of secondary targets of known small-molecule inhibitors in the absence of global structural and sequence homology with the primary target protein.
Using this approach, the authors predicted a few secondary targets for a compound
that inhibits a protein responsible for RNA processing in Trypanosoma brucei and validated some of them.
2) The early atmosphere, the one who witnessed the origin of life, differs greatly from the one present today, the former probably being characterized by very little oxygen and an abundance of carbon dioxide.
The rise of atmospheric oxygen, as stated by Sessions et al., “
was an epic event for both the biosphere and geosphere, and paved the way for the evolution of animal life” [
Current Biology, 19:R567-R574].
LabRat
describes the atmospheric scenery where this marvellous phenomenon took place, billions of years ago, and speculates on the time it took multicellularity to arise from the “
blob phase”.
3) After some hard and arduous work, Psi Wavefunction at Skeptic Wonder, a blogger who usually surprises us with fantastic stories from the bizarre and ever-surprising world of protists,
now unveils her very own tree of Eukaryotes based on an impressive body of work. You should definitely check it out!
From the post, here’s one of the blogger’s reasons for composing this tree…
Remember how I often refer to the Keeling et al 2005 tree when pointing out where some obscure organism lies on the 'map'? Well, that tree is 5 years out of date now. In fields like molecular biology and genomics, a lot can change in five years; compounded with how the protistan phylogeny was still in murky, squishy swamp of a mess only about 10-15 years ago, the current tree is far from static.
4) A recent study using two vertebrate species (zebrafish and mouse), suggests that genes expressed early during development have a more dramatic effect when knocked out or mutated, and also are more likely to revert to single copy after whole genome duplication, than genes expressed late.
It then appears that constraints are high in early stages of vertebrate development, and that the
timing of expression during development, constrains a gene’s "evolvability”Lucas Brouwers at Thoughtomics
comments on a recent paper addressing the following question:
are these developmental and genomic constraints associated to the age of origin of the corresponding genes?5) There has been a lot of fuzz regarding a new paper published in
PLoS Biology recently that, according to “
various articles around the internet”, supposedly undermines GWAS studies. But does it really?
The only real solid claim in the paper is that, if you do not include rare SNPs in your genome-wide association study, and rare SNPs of large effect are contributing to disease, then you will sometimes pick up more common SNPs as associated, because they are in Linkage Disequilibrium with the rare SNPs.
[…]
The paper makes no attempt to say whether this IS happening, just says that it CAN happen, and that we should be AWARE of it.
Luke Jostins at Genetic Interference
takes a critical stand against this paper and makes some interesting points, particularly in the comments section.
I have a lot of issues with this paper, but I will be brief and stick to my main objection; the authors attempt to demonstrate that common associations can be caused by sets of rare variants, and in doing so inadvertantly show they most of them are not.[my emphasis]
That's it for this week. Stay tuned for more MolBio Research Highlights!
On Saturday, at 3:34 am, Chile was struck by a powerful earthquake, one of the most devastating representations of nature. An astounding 8.8-magnitud quake (Richter), one of the most intense recorded in history, has hit Central and Southern Chile, bringing chaos and suffering to many Chilean families. Many people are missing, injured or have been rendered homeless, either due to the quake itself or the accompanying Tsunami, and to date, more than 700 casualties have been confirmed. Sadly, but surely, these numbers will rise. Our heart goes to all those families in this terrible situation. 
