Nerdy Science Blog

Read this news from nature. Scientists from Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovo, Israel had discovered the protein that can erase long-term memories. Yadin Dudai and Reut Shema found that the polypeptide ZIP is useful in “zipping” memories.

They then looked to see what would happen if they injected the rat cortex with ZIP, a small protein Sacktor’s laboratory previously used to block spatial memories held in the hippocampus. ZIP silences an enzyme called PKM-zeta, which Sacktor thinks is key to perpetuating long-term memory.

This is exciting, but there are something else that concern me. Will this discovery be used in military acts or by terrorists? Will it be commercialize just for someone to forget their past becoming the next popular drugs? Maybe it will become the next important thing in the future spy movies like the Bourne series.

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Proteins are one of the major components that build up the bodies of organisms, they are important, they are perform many function such as enzymes, bodies structural elements and etc as you know it.

In our body, proteins assemble themselves, or “fold”. The process of protein folding is crucial; if proteins fold in place, you should praise ‘hallelujah’ every morning when you wake up. Other wise, when proteins misfold, there’s how famous disease like Mad Cow and etc happen. Consequences of the misfold can be deadly. Knowing how proteins fold is thus important, they might help in solving problems related to proteins folding, included Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and etc. However, in many ways, the process remains mystery.

That’s why scientists are keen to find out how proteins fold in molecular level.

This particular website, Fold@home is aimed to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related disease. It is quite interesting. Fold@home is actually a distributed computing project, they provide software for peoples all over the world to download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. At current, the are working on Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, huntington’s disease, osteogenesis imperfecta and etc.

We might not proteins expert, and we might not being able to understand what are they doing, but we can always take a peep how are those fellow scientists are working.

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