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…

The immune system is primed to respond to disease-bearing microbes of almost any description, but what was far from clear was exactly what measures it uses to defeat any such attack. The approaches that the two recipients of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine took to uncovering the answer differed in philosophies and…

Viruses, such as those that cause the common cold or flu, are a particularly devious form of intruder to tackle. Once they enter their host, these infectious agents find cells to hide in while they reproduce in order to infiltrate more targets. Fortunately for us our internal defence system has a trick up its sleeve…

For virtually every invading pathogen, be it a bacterium, virus or another microorganism, the body has a unique antibody specially designed to stop it in its tracks. Made and released by a special type of white blood cell, B lymphocytes, antibodies search for and bind to a distinctive molecule located on the assigned invader, sending…

While fighting off infectious agents, our immune defences must take extreme care to avoid harming any cells belonging to its own host. Achieving this requires a sophisticated self-identification system, and this is centred on a collection of genes called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, which encode proteins known collectively as histocompatibility antigens. Each individual…