The Scientist

NEW YORK, August 18 (Praxis Press). Troglitazone, a member of a new class of antidiabetic drugs, increases insulin sensitivity and promotes adipocyte differentiation. This drug may therefore be therapeutic in patients with lipoatrophic and lipodystrophic disorders. Arioglu and colleagues studied the effects of open-label troglitazone treatment in 20 patients with lipoatrophy and insulin resistance. After 6 months of treatment, fasting triglyceride levels decreased by 2.6 mmol/L (p = 0.019); free

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DNA microarrays are normally used to detect variation in mRNA abundance. But in the August 15 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Khodursky et al. use the arrays to track the progress of replication forks in Escherichia coli (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2000, 97:9419-9424). In a bacterial culture that is replicating synchronously, genomic DNA from replicated regions gives a stronger array signal than unreplicated DNA. Khodursky et al. use this signal variation to show that normal replicat

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In the 17 August Nature Perou et al. present a DNA microarray analysis of 65 human breast tumor specimens from 42 different individuals (Nature 2000, 406:747-752). Of the 8,102 genes analyzed, 1,753 varied in abundance at least fourfold in at least three samples. These genes could be clustered into groups that correlated with mitotic index, regulation of the interferon pathway, and the relative abundance of endothelial cells, stromal cells, adipose cells, B or T cells and macrophages. Expression

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On 2 July 2000, a small black piglet was delivered by a white sow. Xena's dark color was a clue that she was not the warrior princess whose name she bears but the product of the first successful pig cloning from fetal cells. As reported in the 18 August Science, this cloning adds to reports of cloned sheep, cattle, and goats (Onishi et al, Science 2000, 289:1188-1190). Xena was produced using a technique developed in mice in which a nucleus from a somatic cell is microinjected into an enucleated

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A series of narrow-pH-range overloaded 2D gels, processed using sensitive silver-staining, yields enough spots that the gels could, theoretically, be surveying virtually all of the proteins of budding yeast. But in the August 15 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gygi et al. report that proteomics proponents may have been fooling themselves (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2000, 97:9390-9395). Gygi et al. select a random region of one such gel and analyze all the visible spots. The genes co

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