Haydeh Payami helped uncover the genetic basis of Parkinson’s disease. Now, she hopes to find new ways to treat the disease by studying the gut microbiome.

Courtesy of PPL TherapeuticsA new generation of pigs. Headlines in late summer 2000 introduced long-awaited reports on pig cloning and retroviral transmission to mice, pig cells healing rat spinal cords, and a gaff by Dolly dad Ian Wilmut erroneously heralding halt of xenograft work at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland. So it seemed that the question of whether pigs can pass their retroviruses to humans might finally be on the road to resolution. Not quite. Pigs, as the purveyors o

In Vitro Translation Systems Researchers synthesize recombinant proteins in cell-free extracts to verify the identity of cloned genes, to study protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid, and protein-drug interactions, and to carry out mutagenesis studies. In vitro protein translation studies rely on the efficient and selective transcription of cloned genes in vitro, which is now not only possible, but also routine, thanks to the identification of bacteriophage (phage) DNA-dependent RNA polymerases a