In a recent minireview in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, Shoghag Panjarian and Thomas E. Smithgall at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Roxana E. Iacob, Shugui Chen and John R. Engen at Northeastern University discuss how the structure and regulation of Abl kinases influence inhibitor compatibility.

David Schriemer’s group at the University of Calgary came across the monkey cup protease when searching for an aspartic protease that was phylogenetically distant from the standard workhorse protease pepsin. The Schriemer group is interested in hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry, because it has the potential to reveal high-resolution structural and temporal details about complex protein systems.

In the March issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, two groups independently present research on fat-specific protein 27, or FSP27, which in mice plays a key role in lipid storage and mitochondrial activity in fat cells.