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Cell biology is a branch of biology that studies the structure, function, and behavior of cells. All living organisms are made of cells. A cell is the basic unit of life that is responsible for the living and functioning of organisms. Cell biology is the study of the structural and functional units of cells. Cell biology encompasses both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and has many subtopics which may include the study of cell metabolism, cell communication, cell cycle, biochemistry, and cell composition. The study of cells is performed using several microscopy techniques, cell culture, and cell fractionation. These have allowed for and are currently being used for discoveries and research pertaining to how cells function, ultimately giving insight into understanding larger organisms. Knowing the components of cells and how cells work is fundamental to all biological sciences while also being essential for research in biomedical fields such as cancer, and other diseases. Research in cell biology is interconnected to other fields such as genetics, molecular genetics, molecular biology, medical microbiology, immunology, and cytochemistry.
An acetylcholine receptor is an integral membrane protein that responds to the binding of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, or nAChRs, are receptor polypeptides that respond to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Nicotinic receptors also respond to drugs such as the agonist nicotine. They are found in the central and peripheral nervous system, muscle, and many other tissues of many organisms. At the neuromuscular junction they are the primary receptor in muscle for motor nerve-muscle communication that controls muscle contraction. In the peripheral nervous system: (1) they transmit outgoing signals from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic cells within the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and (2) they are the receptors found on skeletal muscle that receive acetylcholine released to signal for muscular contraction. In the immune system, nAChRs regulate inflammatory processes and signal through distinct intracellular pathways. In insects, the cholinergic system is limited to the central nervous system.
Sir Aaron Klug was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
Jean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins, to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions. Although being famous in biological sciences for the MWC model, the identification and purification of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor and the theory of epigenesis by synapse selection are also notable scientific achievements. Changeux is known by the non-scientific public for his ideas regarding the connection between mind and physical brain. As put forth in his book, Conversations on Mind, Matter and Mathematics, Changeux strongly supports the view that the nervous system functions in a projective rather than reactive style and that interaction with the environment, rather than being instructive, results in the selection amongst a diversity of preexisting internal representations.
Electron crystallography is a method to determine the arrangement of atoms in solids using a transmission electron microscope (TEM). It can involve the use of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy images, electron diffraction patterns including convergent-beam electron diffraction or combinations of these. It has been successful in determining some bulk structures, and also surface structures. Two related methods are low-energy electron diffraction which has solved the structure of many surfaces, and reflection high-energy electron diffraction which is used to monitor surfaces often during growth.
Hugh Esmor Huxley MBE FRS was a British molecular biologist who made important discoveries in the physiology of muscle. He was a graduate in physics from Christ's College, Cambridge. However, his education was interrupted for five years by the Second World War, during which he served in the Royal Air Force. His contribution to development of radar earned him an MBE.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical research laboratory at the forefront of scientific discovery, dedicated to improving the understanding of key biological processes at atomic, molecular and cellular levels using multidisciplinary methods, with a focus on using this knowledge to address key issues in human health.
Barbara Mary Frances Pearse FRS is a British biological scientist. She works at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics is located in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biophysics in 1937, and moved into a new building in 2003. It is an institute of the Max Planck Society.
Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank."Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."
Cell surface receptors are receptors that are embedded in the plasma membrane of cells. They act in cell signaling by receiving extracellular molecules. They are specialized integral membrane proteins that allow communication between the cell and the extracellular space. The extracellular molecules may be hormones, neurotransmitters, cytokines, growth factors, cell adhesion molecules, or nutrients; they react with the receptor to induce changes in the metabolism and activity of a cell. In the process of signal transduction, ligand binding affects a cascading chemical change through the cell membrane.
Crystallographic image processing (CIP) is traditionally understood as being a set of key steps in the determination of the atomic structure of crystalline matter from high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) images obtained in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) that is run in the parallel illumination mode. The term was created in the research group of Sven Hovmöller at Stockholm University during the early 1980s and became rapidly a label for the "3D crystal structure from 2D transmission/projection images" approach. Since the late 1990s, analogous and complementary image processing techniques that are directed towards the achieving of goals with are either complementary or entirely beyond the scope of the original inception of CIP have been developed independently by members of the computational symmetry/geometry, scanning transmission electron microscopy, scanning probe microscopy communities, and applied crystallography communities.
Paul Anthony Midgley FRS is a Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Before the emergence of electron microscopy in the 1950s, scientists did not know the structure of a cell membrane or what its components were; biologists and other researchers used indirect evidence to identify membranes before they could actually be visualized. Specifically, it was through the models of Overton, Langmuir, Gorter and Grendel, and Davson and Danielli, that it was deduced that membranes have lipids, proteins, and a bilayer. The advent of the electron microscope, the findings of J. David Robertson, the proposal of Singer and Nicolson, and additional work of Unwin and Henderson all contributed to the development of the modern membrane model. However, understanding of past membrane models elucidates present-day perception of membrane characteristics. Following intense experimental research, the membrane models of the preceding century gave way to the fluid mosaic model that is accepted today.
Chikashi Toyoshima (豊島 近, Toyoshima Chikashi, born July 17, 1954) is a Japanese biophysicist. His research focuses on two proteins: the Ca2+-ATPase of muscle sarcoplasmic reticulum, and the Na+, K+-ATPase expressed in all animal cells. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo and the Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Toyoshima's research about the Ca2+-ATPase started in 1989. In the next few years, he and his colleagues obtained the world's first series of images of Ca2+-ATPase at the atomic level. Via x-ray crystallography, cryo-EM and other methods, he has determined the crystal structures of ten intermediates of Ca2+-ATPase. On September 10, 2015, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him and Poul Nissen the Gregori Aminoff Prize of 2016 for their fundamental contributions to understanding the structural basis for ATP-driven translocation of ions across membranes.
Liquid-phase electron microscopy refers to a class of methods for imaging specimens in liquid with nanometer spatial resolution using electron microscopy. LP-EM overcomes the key limitation of electron microscopy: since the electron optics requires a high vacuum, the sample must be stable in a vacuum environment. Many types of specimens relevant to biology, materials science, chemistry, geology, and physics, however, change their properties when placed in a vacuum.
Lysenin is a pore-forming toxin (PFT) present in the coelomic fluid of the earthworm Eisenia fetida. Pore-forming toxins are a group of proteins that act as virulence factors of several pathogenic bacteria. Lysenin proteins are chiefly involved in the defense against cellular pathogens. Following the general mechanism of action of PFTs lysenin is segregated as a soluble monomer that binds specifically to a membrane receptor, sphingomyelin in the case of lysenin. After attaching to the membrane, the oligomerization begins, resulting in a nonamer on top of membrane, known as a prepore. After a conformational change, which could be triggered by a decrease of pH, the oligomer is inserted into the membrane in the so-called pore state.
Leonid A. Sazanov is a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Sazanov research explores the structure and function of large membrane protein complexes from the domain of bioenergetics. These molecular machines interconvert redox energy and proton motive force across biological membranes using a variety of mechanisms.
