death research

(University of Toronto) It makes your skin crawl -- a bug that crawls onto your lips while you sleep, drawn by the exhaled carbon dioxide, numbs your skin, bites, then gorges on your blood.

And if that's not insult enough, it promptly defecates on the wound -- and passes on a potentially deadly disease.

(Burnham Institute) Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research have identified novel cleavage sites for the enzyme caspase-3 (an enzyme that proteolytically cleaves target proteins).

Using an advanced proteomic technique called N-terminomics, Guy Salvesen, Ph.D., professor and director of the Apoptosis and Cell Death Research program of Burnham's NCI-designated Cancer Center, and colleagues determined the cleavage sites on target proteins and found, contrary to previous understanding, that caspase-3 targets a-helices as well as unstructured loops.