 UW’s Krzysztof Palczewski: All Eyes on Rhodopsin
Any
questions about how visual sensation is created in the eye must
ultimately focus on a single protein called rhodopsin. First identified
120 years ago in vertebrate retina, rhodopsin is the receptor that
begins the translation of light into the biochemical signals that are
eventually perceived as vision. In the mid-1980s, however, rhodopsin
took on another role as a model G-protein-coupled-receptor, a family of
receptors that is now known to number over a thousand and whose members
are effectively ubiquitous in the human body, as sensory and hormonal
receptors. All of them serve to activate what are known as GTP-binding
proteins—hence the term G-protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs—and
all of these receptors share a distinct structure, with a peptide chain
traversing the plasma cell membrane seven times.
As
hot as GPCRs were as an object of research, the one thing that
researchers had failed to achieve, despite several decades of work, was
to elucidate an accurate high-resolution structure of such a receptor.
That changed...
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The
Hottest Journals of the Decade
Science
Watch examines here the highest-impact journals in
selected fields of science over the last decade. On the following
page, are tables listing the top 10 journals in 11 main
fields, ranked according to citations per paper (with the
order determined by each journal’s cites-per-paper score
prior to rounding).
For
these rankings, Science Watch turned to the Thomson ISI web-based evaluation tool
ISI
Essential Science Indicators
(ESI), which tracks publication and citation data over the
last 10 years (with updates every two months). The present
survey is based on papers published and cited in ISI-indexed
journals between
January 1, 1992
, and
December 31, 2002
...
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