Cassandra Willyard is a journalist who covers health and science with a focus on infectious disease, public health and drug development. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Nature and the New York Times. Detectives often find important clues by digging through rubbish. That approach paid off tremendously for systems biologist Yifat Merbl. When she and her team investigated cellular recycling centres known as proteasomes, they uncovered an entirely new part of the immune system. From her office at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, she holds up a blue plastic model of a proteasome, a barrel-shaped structure with a hollow core. The function seems simple: proteins enter the chamber, where they are shredded and then exit as smaller peptide fragments. But the machinery is surprisingly elaborate. The core comprises more than two dozen protein subunits and can associate with a variety of regulatory caps. If the goal is to slice and dice proteins, Merbl wondered, why...
learn more
