I frequently skim through weird things in the newspaper that I suspect most people never look at. One of them is the list of new patents granted to New Mexico businesses or individuals that is posted in the Business Outlook section of the Albuquerque Journal.
Last week, a couple of things in that listing caught my eye.
One was for a patent for “Phosphorylation of Syntaxin 17 by TBk1 controls autophagy initiation.” Wow, that left me speechless and wondering what the heck it was.
I looked up Phosphorylation and found it is “the addition of a phosphoryl (PO3) group to a molecule.” Okay, I’m still in the dark.
But here’s what a phosphoryl group looks like, if you’re interested:
Got it now? Nope, me neither.
I did a little more research and found that Syntaxins are “nervous system-specific proteins implicated in the docking of synaptic vesicles with the presynaptic plasma membrane.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere — I think.
I looked up autophagy and found it was “the natural, conserved degradation of the cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components…”
Given that this patent application went through the University of New Mexico’s Rainforest Innovations center and thinking that it has something to do with human cells, I suspect it is a medical advancement helping to clean up something bad in your body — probably cancer.
Here’s a link to the UNM Rainforest Innovations Center if you want to look at some really interesting research underway:
But the great juxtaposition of this scholarly research next to the following patent approval really got my attention.
It was for a guy from tiny Pie Town, NM, who had been awarded a patent for a “hose manipulation instrument.” Really, that’s what the listing said.
I kind of recall that someone had already invented something like that. As a matter of fact, I think I have two of them. But I certainly don’t have anything that “controls autophagy initiation.”
aero-cordero.com 