Quantification of Mitochondrial Network Characteristics in Health and Disease.

The term 'mitochondrial dynamics' is commonly used to refer to ongoing fusion and fission of mitochondrial structures within a living cell. A growing number of diseases, from Charcot Marie Tooth Type 2a neuropathies to cancer, is known to be associated with the dysregulation of mitochondrial dynamics, leading to irregularities of mitochondrial network morphology that are associated with aberrant metabolism and cellular dysfunction. Studying these phenomena, and potential pharmacological interventions to correct them, in cultured cells is a powerful approach to developing treatments or cures.

Data mining crystallization databases: knowledge-based approaches to optimize protein crystal screens.

Protein crystallization is a major bottleneck in protein X-ray crystallography, the workhorse of most structural proteomics projects. Because the principles that govern protein crystallization are too poorly understood to allow them to be used in a strongly predictive sense, the most common crystallization strategy entails screening a wide variety of solution conditions to identify the small subset that will support crystal nucleation and growth. We tested the hypothesis that more efficient crystallization strategies could be formulated by extracting useful patterns and correlations from the large data sets of crystallization trials created in structural proteomics projects.