- Shimon Weiss' lab has a nice paper out about a new laminar-flow mixer for protein folding studies. It's not particularly fast by fast mixer standards (15 - 20 ms), but it has the nice property of being constructed from off-the-shelf parts, using co-axial capillaries which have been pulled with a standard capillary puller. They show that it can be used for doing smFRET studies of protein folding, and identify a folding intermediate. (I did my undergrad thesis on microfab laminar flow mixers, in Bob Austin's lab at Princeton.)
- Joe Lakowicz has a paper out on coating metallic nanoparticles with fluorescently labeled proteins in order to create fluorescent probes with novel brightness and lifetime properties. This seems to have some nice advantages: the short lifetime allows the particles to be distinguished from cell autofluorescence by fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM). Unfortunately, the content is overshadowed by the fact that it appears to have gotten into press without ever having been edited by a native English speaker, and is just one linguistic gem after another. For instance, "Most MEF [metal enhanced-fluorescence] results are reported on the metal films, but to our knowledge, there are still some publications from us and other laboratories that describe the occurrence of MEF on single metal particles."
- Yet Another Paper in Biophys J on how to do a better job analyzing your noisy single particle tracking data. This isn't really notable, except for the fact that it apparently uses something called "trans-dimensional Sequential Monte Carlo". I have no idea what this is, but it sounds freaking awesome. Combine that with some bistromathics and an infinite improbability drive, and you'd have yourself a Nobel prize.
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