It’s Thanksgiving Week and Congress is in recess.  Perhaps the last you heard about the federal budget for FY 2016 was that there was a bipartisan deal at the end of October.  Sounded like a good outcome.  That is true, but that deal didn’t actually provide funding for the coming year; it just increased the amount of money that could be spent.  Congress has until December 11 to figure out how it is going to divide up those additional dollars and pass a bill to fund the government for the ...

Multi-layered protein coats are used for environmental protection, sensing, and interaction by many micro-organisms, including spore-forming bacteria and viruses. It is potentially very useful to measure the order of protein layers in these microbes, because this may indicate the function of different proteins — for example, which proteins form the outermost layers that protect the spore from lytic enzymes, and which hold the structure together? Electron microscopy studies have established ...

November is Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month in the US. An estimated 5.3 million Americans suffer from the disease, which is particularly prevalent among people age 65 and older. We recently spoke with BPS member Chuck Sanders, Vanderbilt University, Departments of Biochemistry and Medicine, Center for Structural Biology, about his research related to Alzheimer’s disease, which has also affected his own family. 

The cover image represents protein-rich clusters in insulin solution, where they likely serve as precursors to crystal nucleation.  Insulin crystallization is a part of insulin biosynthesis in the mammalian pancreas and an essential step in the manufacture of diabetes medicine.  The image was taken by oblique illumination dark-field microscopy and artificial coloring was applied for artistic effect.