MCB

Biochemistry at Illinois has a long tradition of excellence in biochemical research. Many of our undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral research associates have used their experiences at Illinois to establish careers of responsibility in both academia and the private sector.

I hope that you will take the time to explore our department by investigating our undergraduate and graduate programs so that you can learn about the intellectual opportunities now possible by breakthroughs in this postgenomic era of biology. The future of biochemistry has changed, and we believe that our department is well-positioned to provide training for your future.

Susan Martinis, Head

Dr. Hong Jins lab has solved the atomic structure of a stalled ribosome using state-of-art electron cryo-microscopy. This structure is used to understand how stalled ribosomes are rescued in the cell. The findings were published in Nature in January 2017. Read more...

University of Illinois professors Chad Rienstra (Chemistry), Emad Tajkhorshid, and James Morrissey (Biochemistry) have been awarded a Directors Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health for their highly creative approach to the study of cell membrane lipids. Read more...

To recognize the importance of faculty contributions to science and education and to acknowledge Dr. Sligars mentorship, Dr. Jenner created the Stephen G. Sligar professorship in 2016. The Investiture was held on October 28, 2016 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Read more...

Emad Tajkhorshid, professor of biochemistry, biophysics, computational biology, and pharmacology, and his research group are studying the movement of gases across biological membranes, a vital process for powering cells with oxygen and performing photosynthesis, among other things. The group is hoping to closely examine the role of proteins in these processes in order to better understand the impact of gas exchange in living cells and organisms.

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Southern California are working together with Tajkhorshid on their project, Molecular Mechanisms and Pathways for Gas Transport Across Biological Membranes and Implications for Physiology and Performance. Read more...

A number of current and recent graduate students and postdoctoral scholars have applied for and won prestigious awards and fellowships. The awardees reflect the breadth of outstanding research at UIUC and the quality of students and researchers attracted to the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Read more...

Link:
University of Illinois Department of Biochemistry

"Hands-on" Workshop on Computational Biophysics

This workshop, which runs from April 17-21, 2017, at the Beckman Institute, will be presented by members of the NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling & Bioinformatics at Urbana-Champaign. Topics will cover instruction in state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulation and free energy techniques using NAMD, bacterial cells simulation with Lattice Microbes (LM) and biomolecular visualization and analysis with VMD. Morning lecture presentations will introduce fundamental theory and concepts, while afternoon hands-on computer laboratory sessions will allow participants to apply NAMD, LM and VMD directly in a series of guided tutorials. The workshop is designed for all students and researchers in computational and/or biophysical fields who seek to extend their expertise to include biomolecular simulations. Experimentalists and non-specialists are encouraged to attend and will benefit particularly from instruction in the use of QwikMD, a new teaching software incorporating NAMD and VMD that significantly lowers the learning curve for novice users. Enrollment limited to 25 participants. Application deadline: March 10, 2017 Announcement and Applications: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Training/Workshop/Urbana2017a/

This is the first atomic structure of the ribosome solved by cryoEM on the U of I campus. Its breathtaking to see how each and every atom in this beautiful molecular machine arranged in three-dimension said Dr. Jin. Using the 3D atomic structure and biochemistry, Jin and team were able to decipher how a protein known as ArfA recognizes a stalled bacterial ribosome and recruits release factor RF2 to catalyze peptide release, a process that leads to rescuing the stalled ribosome in the bacterial cell. Since bacterial and human cells employ completely different strategies to rescue stalled ribosomes, the rescue mechanism of bacteria is a drug target. This is also a collegial collaborative effort, our colleagues in the Beckman Institute, the research team led by Prof. Emad Tajkhorshid, provided us with powerful computational resources, said Dr. Jin. Read the full article here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature21053.html

Biophysics Professor Paul Hergenrother's discovery from 10 years ago is showing success in treating cancer in dogs today. Human trials to begin soon. http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/01/24/cancer-dog-drugs/

Center Director Satish Nair has been appointed to the I.C. Gunsalus Endowed Professorship in the College of LAS, for his "demonstrated high originality of thought, independence and impact in research, as well as a commitment to quality."

"This is LAS - A look at our year" features several Biophysics faculty members' achievements! See what some of our chemists have been up to this year.

Biophysics Professor Chad Rienstra has been elected 2016 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished contributions to the development of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance for structural determination of large biomolecular assemblies relevant to human disease.

Biophysics Professor Klaus Schulten has passed away. He was an integral member of the computational biology program and was highly respected. For more information regarding his work please visit the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group.

Follow this link:
About | Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology ...

One major mystery about life's origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used systems biology approaches to tackle this long-standing conundrum, providing compelling, data-driven evidence that primitive life forms may not have relied on phosphate at all. Instead, a few simple, abundant molecules could have supported the emergence of a sulfur-based, phosphate-free metabolism, which expanded to form a rich network of biochemical reactions capable of supporting the synthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules.

"The significance of this work is that future efforts to understand life's origin should take into account the concrete possibility that phosphate-based processes, which are essential today, may not have been around when the first life-like processes started emerging," says senior study author Daniel Segr (@dsegre) of Boston University. "An early phosphate-independent metabolism capable of producing several key building blocks of living systems is in principle viable."

Phosphate is essential for all living systems and is present in a large proportion of known biomolecules. A sugar-phosphate backbone forms the structural framework of nucleic acids, including DNA and RNA. Moreover, phosphate is a critical component of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which transports chemical energy within cells, and a compound called NADH, which has several essential roles in metabolism. But it is unclear how phosphate could have assumed these central roles on primordial Earth, given its scarcity and poor accessibility.

In light of this puzzle, some have proposed that early metabolic pathways did not rely on phosphate. In many of these scenarios, sulfur and iron found on mineral surfaces are thought to have fulfilled major catalytic and energetic functions prior to the appearance of phosphate. One notable origin-of-life scenario suggests that the role of ATP was originally assumed by sulfur-containing compounds called thioesters, which are widely involved in protein, carbohydrate, and lipid metabolism. Despite the availability of iron and sulfur on early Earth, concrete evidence supporting these scenarios has been lacking.

To test the feasibility of the "iron-sulfur world hypothesis" and the "thioester world scenario," Segr and his team used computational systems biology approaches originally developed for large-scale analyses of complex metabolic networks. The researchers used a large database to assemble the complete set of all known biochemical reactions. After exploring this so-called "biosphere-level metabolism," the researchers identified a set of eight phosphate-free compounds thought to have been available in prebiotic environments. They then used an algorithm that simulated the emergence of primitive metabolic networks by compiling all possible reactions that could have taken place in the presence of these eight compounds, which included formate, acetate, hydrogen sulfide, ammonium, carbon dioxide, water, bicarbonate, and nitrogen gas.

This analysis revealed that a few simple prebiotic compounds could support the emergence of a rich, phosphate-independent metabolic network. This core network, consisting of 315 reactions and 260 metabolites, was capable of supporting the biosynthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules such as amino acids and carboxylic acids. Notably, the network was enriched for enzymes containing iron-sulfur clusters, bolstering the idea that modern biochemistry emerged from mineral geochemistry. Moreover, thioesters rather than phosphate could have enabled this core metabolism to overcome energetic bottlenecks and expand under physiologically realistic conditions.

"Before our study, other researchers had proposed a sulfur-based early biochemistry, with hints that phosphate may not have been necessary until later," Segr says. "What was missing until now was data-driven evidence that these early processes, rather than scattered reactions, could have constituted a highly connected and relatively rich primitive metabolic network."

Although this non-experimental evidence does not definitively prove that life started without phosphate, it provides compelling support for the iron-sulfur world hypothesis and the thioester world scenario. At the same time, the study calls into question the "RNA world hypothesis," which proposes that self-replicating RNA molecules were the precursors to all current life on Earth. Instead, the results support the "metabolism-first hypothesis," which posits that a self-sustaining phosphate-free metabolic network predated the emergence of nucleic acids. In other words, nucleic acids could have been an outcome of early evolutionary processes rather than a prerequisite for them.

"Evidence that an early metabolism could have functioned without phosphate indicates that phosphate may have not been an essential ingredient for the onset of cellular life," says first author Joshua Goldford of Boston University. "This proto-metabolic system would have required an energy source and may have emerged either on the Earth's surface, with solar energy as the main driving force, or in the depth of the oceans near hydrothermal vents, where geochemical gradients could have driven the first life-like processes."

In future studies, the researchers will continue to apply systems biology approaches to study the origin of life. "My hope is that these findings will motivate further studies of the landscape of possible historical paths of metabolism, as well as specific experiments for testing the feasibility of a phosphate-free sulfur-based core biochemistry," Segr says. "The idea of analyzing metabolism as an ecosystem-level or even planetary phenomenon, rather than an organism-specific one, may also have implications for our understanding of microbial communities. Furthermore, it will be interesting to revisit the question of how inheritance and evolution could have worked prior to the appearance of biopolymers."

Story Source:

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Original post:
Biochemical 'fossil' shows how life may have emerged without ... - Science Daily

We are pleased to welcome all the interested participants to International Conference and Exhibition on Biochemistry during November 02-03, 2017 at Chicago, Illinois, USA. Biochemistry Conference 2017 welcomes all the members form universities, clinical examination foundations and organizations, biochemists, scientists, researchers, academicians, entrepreneurs, research scholars and delegates from biochemistry labs, industries and healthcare sectors to be a part of the conference to share their knowledge on all parts of this rapidly expanded field and then, by providing a showcase of the research in the field on Biochemistry.

The conference focuses on the theme "Biochemistry Rethink Rebuild Reclaim".

Biochemistry Conference 2017 aims to provide scientific platform for face to face exchange of knowledge and ideas across the Biochemistry. The conference is designed to give knowledge, ideas and to think out of the box. The aim of the conference is to promote research in the field of Biochemistry with another goal to facilitate exchange of new ideas in these fields and to create a dialogue between scientists, practitioners and biochemists.

For more details, please visit: http://biochemistry.alliedacademies.com/

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International Conference and Exhibition on Biochemistry - Technology Networks

The College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources is pleased to announce the hiring of Robert O'Mara Ryan as new University of Nevada, Reno Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

"After a national search, which generated a large number of highly qualified candidates for the chair position, Dr. Ryan emerged as the top candidate," Chris Pritsos, director of the Nevada Agricultural Experimental Station and one of the lead recruiters for CABNR, said. "His energy and expertise in the area of human health will be a strong influence on the department and will strengthen its expertise in the area of human health and disease."

Ryan comes to the University after serving 16 years as senior scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. He has also spent the past 12 years as adjunct professor in the Department of Nutritional Science and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Dr. Ryan is a very strong teacher and researcher," David Shintani, CABNR associate dean for academic programs and associate professor, said. "Because of his diverse research background (ranging from insect to human biochemistry), he will understand and appreciate the current research emphases of the department and be able to lead targeted hires and address programmatic deficiencies."

After obtaining his bachelor's degree from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1977 he continued his education here, earning his doctorate in biochemistry in 1982. Ryan went on to become a professor and research assistant with the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Arizona from 1983 to 1988. He then accepted a position as an assistant professor, and eventually director, of the Department of Biochemistry and Lipid and Lipoprotein Research Group at the University of Alberta, Canada, from 1988 to 2000.

His other accomplishments include numerous scientific publications, honors and awards in areas such as biochemistry and lipoprotein research, and service work with committees in relation to his professional work and achievements.

More here:
Robert O'Mara Ryan returns to University as new department chair - Nevada Today

March 2, 2017 A schematic depiction of how an early metabolism could have expanded from an initial set of prebiotic molecules, with thioester (S) vs. phosphate (P) as the main driving force. Credit: Joshua Goldford and Daniel Segr

One major mystery about life's origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used systems biology approaches to tackle this long-standing conundrum, providing compelling, data-driven evidence that primitive life forms may not have relied on phosphate at all. Instead, a few simple, abundant molecules could have supported the emergence of a sulfur-based, phosphate-free metabolism, which expanded to form a rich network of biochemical reactions capable of supporting the synthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules.

"The significance of this work is that future efforts to understand life's origin should take into account the concrete possibility that phosphate-based processes, which are essential today, may not have been around when the first life-like processes started emerging," says senior study author Daniel Segr of Boston University. "An early phosphate-independent metabolism capable of producing several key building blocks of living systems is in principle viable."

Phosphate is essential for all living systems and is present in a large proportion of known biomolecules. A sugar-phosphate backbone forms the structural framework of nucleic acids, including DNA and RNA. Moreover, phosphate is a critical component of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which transports chemical energy within cells, and a compound called NADH, which has several essential roles in metabolism. But it is unclear how phosphate could have assumed these central roles on primordial Earth, given its scarcity and poor accessibility.

In light of this puzzle, some have proposed that early metabolic pathways did not rely on phosphate. In many of these scenarios, sulfur and iron found on mineral surfaces are thought to have fulfilled major catalytic and energetic functions prior to the appearance of phosphate. One notable origin-of-life scenario suggests that the role of ATP was originally assumed by sulfur-containing compounds called thioesters, which are widely involved in protein, carbohydrate, and lipid metabolism. Despite the availability of iron and sulfur on early Earth, concrete evidence supporting these scenarios has been lacking.

To test the feasibility of the "iron-sulfur world hypothesis" and the "thioester world scenario," Segr and his team used computational systems biology approaches originally developed for large-scale analyses of complex metabolic networks. The researchers used a large database to assemble the complete set of all known biochemical reactions. After exploring this so-called "biosphere-level metabolism," the researchers identified a set of eight phosphate-free compounds thought to have been available in prebiotic environments. They then used an algorithm that simulated the emergence of primitive metabolic networks by compiling all possible reactions that could have taken place in the presence of these eight compounds, which included formate, acetate, hydrogen sulfide, ammonium, carbon dioxide, water, bicarbonate, and nitrogen gas.

This analysis revealed that a few simple prebiotic compounds could support the emergence of a rich, phosphate-independent metabolic network. This core network, consisting of 315 reactions and 260 metabolites, was capable of supporting the biosynthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules such as amino acids and carboxylic acids. Notably, the network was enriched for enzymes containing iron-sulfur clusters, bolstering the idea that modern biochemistry emerged from mineral geochemistry. Moreover, thioesters rather than phosphate could have enabled this core metabolism to overcome energetic bottlenecks and expand under physiologically realistic conditions.

"Before our study, other researchers had proposed a sulfur-based early biochemistry, with hints that phosphate may not have been necessary until later," Segr says. "What was missing until now was data-driven evidence that these early processes, rather than scattered reactions, could have constituted a highly connected and relatively rich primitive metabolic network."

Although this non-experimental evidence does not definitively prove that life started without phosphate, it provides compelling support for the iron-sulfur world hypothesis and the thioester world scenario. At the same time, the study calls into question the "RNA world hypothesis," which proposes that self-replicating RNA molecules were the precursors to all current life on Earth. Instead, the results support the "metabolism-first hypothesis," which posits that a self-sustaining phosphate-free metabolic network predated the emergence of nucleic acids. In other words, nucleic acids could have been an outcome of early evolutionary processes rather than a prerequisite for them.

"Evidence that an early metabolism could have functioned without phosphate indicates that phosphate may have not been an essential ingredient for the onset of cellular life," says first author Joshua Goldford of Boston University. "This proto-metabolic system would have required an energy source and may have emerged either on the Earth's surface, with solar energy as the main driving force, or in the depth of the oceans near hydrothermal vents, where geochemical gradients could have driven the first life-like processes."

In future studies, the researchers will continue to apply systems biology approaches to study the origin of life. "My hope is that these findings will motivate further studies of the landscape of possible historical paths of metabolism, as well as specific experiments for testing the feasibility of a phosphate-free sulfur-based core biochemistry," Segr says. "The idea of analyzing metabolism as an ecosystem-level or even planetary phenomenon, rather than an organism-specific one, may also have implications for our understanding of microbial communities. Furthermore, it will be interesting to revisit the question of how inheritance and evolution could have worked prior to the appearance of biopolymers."

Explore further: Metabolism may have started in our early oceans before the origin of life

More information: Cell, Goldford et al: "Remnants of an Ancient Metabolism without Phosphate" http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30133-2 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.02.001

Journal reference: Cell

Provided by: Cell Press

The chemical reactions behind the formation of common metabolites in modern organisms could have formed spontaneously in the earth's early oceans, questioning the events thought to have led to the origin of life.

The phosphate ion is almost insoluble and is one of the most inactive of Earth's most abundant phosphate minerals. So how could phosphate have originally been incorporated into ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, ...

(Phys.org)A gigantic number of chemical reactions take place inside our bodies every second, all synchronizing with each other to produce the energy and chemical compounds that we need to survive. Together these reactions ...

On the early Earth, light came not only from the sun but also from the incessant bombardment of fireball meteorites continually striking the planet. Now, the recent work of University of South Florida (USF) associate professor ...

(Phys.org) A trio of researchers at the University of Nevada has found that phosphate found in minerals on Mars, is far more soluble than it is in natural Earth minerals. In their paper published in the journal Nature ...

Inorganic phosphate is an essential building block of cell membranes, DNA and proteins. It is also a main component of ATP, the "cell currency" of energy transfer. All cells therefore need to maintain a sufficient concentration ...

Biophysicists at JILA have measured protein folding in more detail than ever before, revealing behavior that is surprisingly more complex than previously known. The results suggest that, until now, much about protein behavior ...

One major mystery about life's origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has found that adding a certain type of salt to liquid pesticides greatly reduces waste due to splashing. In their paper published in the journal ...

The chemical industry can learn a lot from the common mussel. Not only are the mollusc's mother of pearl and tough threads with which it clings to the seafloor remarkable, but the way in which these materials are produced ...

In an age of booming biotechnology, it might be easy to forget how much we still rely on the bounty of the natural world. Some microbes make us sick, some keep us healthy, while others continue to give us some of our best ...

Using 3-D electron microscopy, structural biologists from the University of Zurich succeeded in elucidating the architecture of the lamina of the cell nucleus at molecular resolution for the first time. This scaffold stabilizes ...

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Biochemical 'fossil' shows how life may have emerged without phosphate - Phys.Org

Cal State Fullerton undergraduate Miguel Tellez is an aspiring biomedical researcher who wants to contribute to a better understanding of the human body and use that knowledge to develop novel therapies for human diseases.

To accomplish this goal, he is conducting research in the lab of Maria C. Linder, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, focusing on an aspect of copper metabolism in the body that holds promise for new discoveries.

For his research efforts, Tellez has received a $3,500Howell-CSUPERB Research Scholar Awardfrom the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB) for his project on the "Purification and Characterization of a Small Copper Carrier From Blood Plasma A Structural and Physiological Study." CSUPERB partners with the Doris A. Howell Foundation for Women's Health Research to fund undergraduate student research projects on topics related to women's health.

Tellez's research centers on purifying and characterizing a copper-containing component that is present in the blood plasma of most mammals and is elevated in conditions where copper accumulates in the liver. This occurs in certain genetic diseases; it is also common in dogs, who frequently die of copper overload, said Linder.

"My project will allow me to contribute to the field of copper research by bringing to light the identity of small copper-carrying components," said Tellez, a biochemistry major who is on track to graduate in May and is the first in his family to attend college. He plans to begin his doctoral studies this summer in the biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology graduate program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Tellez is a research scholar in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) program, led by Linder, and a past scholar in the CSU Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program.

"He is a young man of enormous potential," Linder said. "His project is exciting and is likely to lead to a breakthrough in the field of copper metabolism."

During pregnancy, copper transport and metabolism during embryogenesis involves aspects of copper metabolism, which are still poorly understood. Yet, every cell in a developing fetus needs copper. Additionally, we have evidence that when women take estrogen-based birth control, it changes the distribution of copper in plasma and elicits large amounts of small copper carrying components. As such, understanding these small copper carriers in the blood plasma is paramount to understanding healthy copper metabolism in women during menstruation and pregnancy.

Because of this research project, I have learned many analytical and biochemical techniques. I've also had the opportunity to present my work at conferences, and by being a part of the HHMI undergraduate program, I learned how to read scientific literature and now better understand other areas of science.

After working with Dr. Linder, I discovered what it meant to be a researcher. She has given me encouragement and has helped me down the academic pathway to earn a doctorate.

In the first grade, I became interested in science after I fed a caterpillar. After some time, it turned into a butterfly, and I was in awe. I wanted to understand what I was seeing. My love for science pushed me to do well in school so I could pursue a career as a scientist.

More:
Women's Health Research Leads to CSU Award, Graduate School - CSUF News

University of Otago researchers have made a ''significant step'' forward in understanding a key factor in Parkinson's disease, gastric cancer and melanoma.

Peter Mace, of the Otago biochemistry department, led the research, working with Australian scientists. The study's first two authors are Johannes Weijman and Dr Abhishek Kumar, of the department.

Dr Mace is ''very excited'' about the outcome of this ''fundamental biochemistry of cells'', which sheds new light on several disease processes.

The Otago-led study of a protein called apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1 (ASK1) has just been published in PNAS.

Apoptosis is programmed cell death, which protects the rest of the body if damage to an individual cell is too great.

ASK1 and other kinases act as signalling proteins that control many aspects of cellular behaviour. Kinases put tags on to other proteins that can turn them on or off, which in turn can make a cell respond in many ways, including by dividing, dying or moving.

ASK1 also helps control how a cell responds to damage, including by pushing it towards apoptosis.

The research team determined ASK1's previously ''very little known'' molecular structure through using the Melbourne-based Australian synchrotron.

Researchers had learned a lot more about how the protein was turned on and off, which was ''important'', because in diseases such as Parkinson's, stomach cancer and melanoma there could be either ''too much of, or too little ASK1 activity''.

Kinases were ''excellent targets'' for developing new drugs because they had a ''pocket'' in their structure that such compounds could bind to.

But to develop better drugs, far more knowledge was needed, he said.

john.gibb@odt.co.nz

See the article here:
Research on signalling protein sheds new light on disease processes - Otago Daily Times

If youre a regular reader of Nanalyze, youll know that were big fans of the work that Bryan Johnson of Kernel is doing, essentially trying to enable read/write access to the brain. In one of his interviews, he remarks thatever since we first booted up a cell with human engineered DNA, we entered a new era that according to his mentor Peter Diamandis 99.9% of people have no idea weve entered.

What theyre referring to is the fact that humans have essentially discoveredthe Engines of Creation that Eric Drexler was talking about. While everyone is running around slinging political mud at each other like a bunch of primitive monkeys, mankind is working on one of the most transformational technologies that may ever be invented. Its called synthetic biology and its why everyone should have a basic understanding of biochemistry.

When you werechoosing your major in college, you either had your mind set on a particular field already or you needed to peruse all thesubject areas to see what sounded like a good fit. Each subject area will have a certain stereotype associated with it.Some fields sound boring like electrical engineering or accounting. Some fields sound inherently difficult, like physics or mathematics. Other fieldsyou may not have an idea of what they do because they never sounded compelling enough to research. Thats the case for us withbiochemistry and thats why we thought as investors we should edify ourselves on what turned out to be a very relevant and interesting area of the sciences.

If we lookup the basic definition of biochemistry, this is what we get:

the branch of science concerned with the chemical and physico-chemical processes and substances which occur within living organisms.

So its a bit different from chemistry since itsall about the study of chemical processes in living organisms. Heres why it came about according to the American Chemical Society:

Biochemistry emerged as a separate discipline when scientists combined biology with organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry and began to study how living things obtain energy from food, the chemical basis of heredity, what fundamental changes occur in disease, and related issues.

The most basic premise is that you are using living things to take INPUT X and turn it into OUTPUT Y in the most efficient manner possible. If you think about humans as a complex organism, we are able to utilize the equivalent of several pounds of vegetative material to power one of the most complex and amazing machines on the planet. The problem with us though, is that the output from that process has no real use except maybe as fertilizer.

In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 13,500 chemical manufacturing facilities in the United States owned by more than 9,000 companies. These are giant operations which consume a great deal of energy, require a large workforce to maintain, and generate a great deal of pollution. Imagine how much energy and effort goes into building compex mechanical contraptions like this:

Your bog standard chemicals plant

Think about how inefficient these plants have been over the decades theyve sat there consuming resources and feeding the mass consumerism that we enjoy in todays modern society.Now think about this. What if instead of using these inneficient plants, we engineered biological organisms to produce chemicals by modifying the DNA of the organisms so they did what we needed.The simplest way to think about it is to visualize those punch-cards we used our dads used back in the day. If thats beyond your time, heres what an IBM punch card used to look like:

In the olden days of mainframe computing, we used apunch card like the ones seen above toprovide the computer with a set of instructions. With DNA, its pretty much the same idea except its like havingprecisely this many punch cards:

The above pile of phone books shows roughly the amount of data that a strand of DNA contains, approximately 700gigabytes of data. DNA is one giant punch card that just recently weve been given the hole punch for. That hole punch is called gene editing and its been all over the news lately due to a nasty lawsuit that will determine who has the commercial rights to one of the most exciting discoveries known to man. This biological hole punch called CRISPR will soon let us change every single characteristic we like for any organism and then boot it up so we have our own little biological nanobots doing things for us.Since organisms are the most efficient biological factories (or engines of creation) known to man, it makes sense that we should be modifying them to produce as many industrial chemicals as possible.

The use of synthetic biology for creating things like biofuels (primarily)was off to a rough start as evidenced by the cratering stocks involved in this space like Amyris (NASDAQ:AMRS) and Gevo (NASDAQ:GEVO). Fast forward to today and the potential is even greater but a different model is now being applied. Now you have nanobot factories like Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen that areusing artificial intelligence, robotics, and gene editing in order to create little tiny biological chemical manufacturing plants.

Lets say youre a chemical plant that uses a particular enzyme in your production process. Ginkgo or Zymergen can take that enzyme and modify it over millions and millions of iterations. The speed at which they can modify that enzyme has just hit hockey stick growth as seen below:

The end result is an optimized enzyme that meets your requirements and saves you millions of dollars. Startups like this that are using synthetic biology to completely overhaul the industrial chemical manufacturing process are as secretive as you would expect. While we may not have detailed information about what theyre working on, we can take a look at some examples of startups that are using biochemistry and synthetic bioogyin order to create some pretty complex and useful outputs from some basic interesting inputs:

These startups are backed by some big dollars and some big names, however the future business model is a bit hazy here. Will we have the chemical companies going directly to the creators of the synthetic organisms like Ginkgo or will we have startups like the ones mentioned above doing all the production and selling to the chemical companies, only to get acquired once the technology is proven? The one thing that we can be sure of here is that the large chemical producers will profit fromthe use of biochemistry, synthetic biology, and gene editing, consequently we can expect shareholders in these companies to reap the benefits.

This morning when youre tempted to talk about how much political mudslinging there was at the Oscars or who wore the cutest dress, do the world a favor and tell someone how exciting biochemistry is instead.

Looking to buy shares in companies before they IPO?A company called Motif Investing lets you buy pre-IPO shares in companies that are led by JP Morgan. You can open an account with Motif with no deposit required so that you are ready to buy pre-IPO shares when they are offered.

Read more from the original source:
What is Biochemistry and Why it Matters - Nanalyze

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has attracted several top female honors students to the program through its biochemistry emphasis. Photo by Robert Jordan/Ole Miss Communications Photo by Robert Jordan/Ole Miss Communications

Mixing people, like chemicals, can yield either victorious or violent results. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Mississippi has done so successfully and recently was nationally recognized for its achievements.

The American Chemical Society presented the department with its Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences for the Southeastern Region. The department received a plaque and $1,000 to continue its efforts.

We are honored that the departments long-term and continued commitment to increasing diversity in a central STEM discipline has been recognized with this significant award, said Greg Tschumper, chair and professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

The nomination package submitted by the UM local section of ACS included a number of accolades, which were the direct result of the departments longstanding efforts to increase participation of women and underrepresented minorities in chemistry. Of particular note was the hiring of Davita Watkins, the departments first African-American woman as an assistant professor, in 2014.

Three recent African-American graduates, Margo Montgomery-Richardson, Kari Copeland and Shana Stoddard, were hired as assistant professors at Alcorn State University, Allen University and Rhodes College, respectively.

Also, a former summer program participant, Sharifa T. Love-Rutledge, who at the time was a Tougaloo College undergraduate, made history by becoming the first African-American woman to earn a chemistry degree at the University of Alabama.

Overall, five African-Americans and one Hispanic, three of whom are women, earned their chemistry doctorates from the Ole Miss chemistry department over a one-year period in 2012-13.

Other notable achievements include a graduate population that has maintained a 30 percent to 50 percent female and a 10 percent to 15 percent minority rate over the past five years and an undergraduate forensic chemistry program where 76 percent of the majors are women.

The department has vigorously adopted a number of new strategies to recruit underrepresented students into the chemistry program, said Nathan Hammer, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

There is a new awards celebration, which, in 2015 alone, recognized 32 female undergraduate chemistry students. The department has implemented a welcome to school picnic for undergraduate chemistry students, which also has increased the number of women and minority chemistry majors.

Further, the department recently modified its ACS-accredited Bachelor of Science in Chemistry program to have an optional biochemistry emphasis to attract pre-med students, which resulted in women becoming nearly half those majors.

Katrina Caldwell, UM vice chancellor for diversity and community engagement, commended the department for its efforts and subsequent recognition.

Congratulations to the department for receiving this honor, Caldwell said. Your efforts will contribute greatly to the universitys demonstrated commitment to diversity and equity.

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has more than 500 undergraduate chemistry majors and nearly 50 graduate students. It offers Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, masters and doctoral degrees.

The UM local section of the ACS in north Mississippi encompasses 21 counties. The chapters goals focus on meaningful social and professional relationships between chemistry-related professionals including high school and college students, teachers at all levels of the chemical sciences and professional chemists.

For more information about the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, visit http://chemistry.olemiss.edu/.

By Edwin Smith

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UM Chemistry Department Achieves National Recognition For Diversity - HottyToddy.com