At first sight it seems simple enough: DNA makes RNA makes protein, and, by extension, you and me and every living thing. But this ‘central dogma of biology’, as famously called it, requires some stupendously complicated machinery to make it happen, and much of the last half century of research has been devoted to unravelling…

The discoveries awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are a shining example of how fundamental research in one area of science can sometimes lead to highly beneficial applications in another. In this case, finding the key to how a marine organism produces light unexpectedly ended-up providing researchers with a powerful array of tools with…

Lying between your genes and you are molecular machines that allow the otherwise silent information wrapped-up in your DNA to speak. Working in turn to select, transmit, read and decipher the DNA code, they drive the production of all the components needed for life. Roger Kornberg’s research focuses on the earliest phases of this process,…

Scientific progress can be said to be determined not only by the ingenuity of basic findings but also by the key developments that expand their use. A prime example is Richard Ernst’s advances that have successfully brought a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, to the scientific and medical mainstream. In the late…

In the 1980s, efforts to determine the structures of all known proteins needed to overcome one large – or more accurately speaking, microscopic – barrier. Many proteins involved in vital biological functions, such as the transport of nutrients into cells or nerve impulses, span the fatty membranes that surround every cell in order to carry…

In the first half of the 20th century, crystallization of small simple molecules had become a vital process in understanding their chemical nature, but could crystallization also help in understanding the chemical nature of vital processes? Three scientists overcame the barrier of crystallizing proteins in different ways, and for their achievements they shared the Nobel…

Obtaining chemical structures with X-rays is more than just a matter of passing X-rays through crystals and generating data that reveal the final structure. The scientist’s ability to handle the data and ‘see’ the structure is of vital importance, and Dorothy Hodgkin was one of the field’s finest experts. X-ray crystallography was a relatively new…

The inspiration that X-rays could reveal the structures of chemical compounds inevitably gave way to the perspiration required to solve more and more complicated structures. Max Perutz and John Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for their major achievement of successfully using X-rays to determine the structures of complex proteins. The pattern…

Many important tasks in living cells like muscle contraction and nerve impulse transmission are driven by electrical power, generated by positively and negatively charged atoms, or ions, flowing into and out of cells. It was assumed that this ion transport is regulated by tunnel-like channels nestled within the cell’s outer boundary, yet for decades it…

The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine rewarded three scientists who deciphered the signalling pathways that regulate some of the brain’s most important functions. The primary switches for these processes are neurotransmitters: chemical messengers sent from one nerve cell to another across the tiny junctions, or synapses, that separate them. Arvid Carlsson overturned conventional…