A weekly round-up of local science-related research/news/issues, offered up for discussion. Feel free to comment, or let us know what else you’ve been reading about this week.

SIO scientists are taking advantage of the Beijing Olympics to measure the efficacy of massive efforts to curb air pollution.. This week unmanned aircraft, satellites, and other tools will be used to track the path of particulate matter and other forms of pollution traveling downwind from Beijing. The drastic cuts in automobile usage and industrial emissions China has made ahead of the Olympics will provide a rare sort of “before” and “after” assessment of human impact on air quality.

Researchers at UCSD developed a quick method to detect the deadly toxin ricin. Ricin does its damage by nicking ribosomal RNA, effectively ending all protein translation. It only takes a very small amount to kill a person and is hard to detect. To address this problem, the researchers, led by Prof. Yitzhak Tor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, developed a fluorescently labeled string of RNA nucleotides that contains the sequence recognized by ricin. When the toxin cleaves the sequence, the reaction glows blue under UV light. This new technique will eventually be incorporated into a chip for rapid detection of ricin, replacing the slow process of checking for ricin using antibodies against the protein. Even better, this study targets ricin’s mechanism of action, leaving the door open for the development of inhibitors that block the RNA cutting process. No other antidote exists at the moment.

Publishing in Cell this week, Scripps scientists and their collaborators revealed the structure of the coat that surrounds vesicles exporting proteins out of cells. Protein folding and transport through the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, and across the plasma membrane is a carefully controlled process that can result in a variety of diseases when it runs astray, including cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and obesity. This new understanding of the complex latticework that surrounds these transport vesicles shows that the type of protein cargo determines the structure of the coat. And this coat is flexible – expanding when the cargo is large and shrinking when it’s small. This study opens up a whole new avenue for determining what causes a disease. Moreover, correcting aberrant vesicle coat proteins could represent a new type of therapy.

What were you thinking about (scientifically) this week? Feel free to comment on anything, including the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico, the evidence against the anthrax scientist in Maryland, disease stem cells created at Harvard, etc…