Word: proteins
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DIET DOES IT Doctors have known that eating lots of fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy foods and slightly higher-than-average amounts of protein can lower blood pressure. Last week they reported that the regimen works especially well for blacks. It lowers their blood pressure an average of 13 points--about as much as medication does. Among whites, readings drop 6 points. The diet works even for patients who do not cut back on salt...
Seeking the best candidate, Verma zeroed in on the most notorious of the retroviruses--HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He eliminated the protein envelope that allows the virus entry into T cells, substituted one enabling it to infect a greater variety of cells, and removed the six genes that make the virus dangerous...
...position. Another gene that tells cells to slow down (the brake) must be disabled. And the molecules that fix any mistakes in the DNA code (the repair crew) have to go on strike. In half of all colon cancers, the accelerator is a gene called ras, which makes a protein that stimulates cell growth. It was the ideal target for an anticancer drug...
...seemed. "We banged our heads against the wall for 10 years," says Dr. Alan Oliff, head of cancer research at Merck. "We were on the verge of abandoning the project." Then Oliff's team realized something critical: the ras protein can't do its job until it has been activated by another enzyme called a farnesyl transferase. Maybe that would make a better target? Early word is that it does, but Merck won't publish the findings from its first human trials until sometime next year...
Because their cells naturally produce large quantities of protein, potatoes and tomatoes seem for now to be the most efficient vehicles for the new approach. Instead of mixing viral or bacterial DNA in a formula for injection, for example, scientists could insert it into soil bacteria. When the bacteria are taken up by the plant, therapeutic DNA material is stitched into the plant's genome. Another method of getting genes into plants is to coat tiny particles of tungsten or gold with foreign DNA, then shoot the particles directly into plant cells. Either way, the plant's cells start...