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WHO regional director uses the occasion to warn about bird flu

US speaks out in support of total cloning ban, vote may take place soon

What stem cell initiative?California's Proposition 71 on the Nov. 2 ballot would create a $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine based on stem cell research. Supporters have raised about $15 million, aired thousands of television ads, and garnered media attention across the United States. But ask a Californian about the local buzz on the ballot initiative and the likely answer will be, "I haven't heard anyone talking about it."Karen Grant, who works at the Good Ol' Boys Saloon

A genetically modified grass has passed a RoundUp-resistance transgene on to a related species growing 14 km away and to wild-growing plants of the same species 21 km away, according to a group from the US Environmental Protection Agency. A novel sampling method, employing widespread sentinel plants placed at different locations, found evidence of gene flow from transgenic bent-grass (Agrostis stolonifera) into the related species, Agrostis gigantea.But, there was no evidence that the gene cross

Two studies appear to confirm DNA barcoding as a powerful taxonomic tool. Paul Hebert and colleagues at the University of Guelph, Ontario, analyzed the single gene for cytochrome c oxidase I to distinguish 260 known North American bird species. The so-called DNA barcodes identified four new cryptic species as well.1The group also used the technique to demonstrate that the neotropical skipper butterfly, Astraptes fulgerator, comprises at least 10 species.2 Felix Sperling of the University of Albe

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.D.D. Sarbassov et al., "Rictor, a novel binding partner of mTOR, defines a rapamycin-insensitive and raptor-independent pathway that regulates the cytoskeleton," Curr Biol, 14:1296–302, July 27, 2004.The authors describe a novel molecular mechanism whereby downstream signaling in the mammalian target of the rapamycin (mTOR) pathway may proceed in

RETRO MEETS NOUVEAU:Courtesy of TTP LabTechTTP LabTech's comPOUND and mosquito (inset) systems.With a flash of art deco teal and some vintage engineering decisions, TTP LabTech is making 21st-century science look decidedly retro. Inspired by the pneumatic systems once used to shoot money through tubes in banks, the company's comPOUND storage and retrieval system dispatches chemical vials with a whoosh of air. Its mosquito liquid-handling system, meanwhile, looks a bit like a 35-mm film reel or p

Courtesy of PerkinElmerBoston-based PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences has just received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration for the company's NeoGram tandem mass spectrometry screening kit to be used in metabolic testing of newborn infants http://las.perkinelmer.com.The system measures the concentrations of amino acids and carnitines (molecules associated with the transport of fatty acids across mitochondrial membranes) in the blood of newborns. Abnormal levels of these mol

Because traditional HPLC is slow, high-throughput drug discovery often hits a bottleneck when large numbers of reaction products are assayed. This bottleneck can be eased by techniques such as microparallel liquid chromatography (μPLC), in which samples are assayed in parallel using microfluidic technology.But moving liquids through tiny tubes poses special challenges, too, such as troubleshooting for tiny leaks. In Pasadena, Calif.-based Nanostream's Veloce system, these challenges are ove

Roland Siezen and colleagues at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have created a software tool that's long overdue. Most researchers in the eukaryotic model organism community have genome browsers capable of integrating and overlaying various datasets to produce annotated chromosome maps. Microbiologists, though, have been largely out of luck.Now the playing field has been leveled a bit. Microbial Genome Viewer (MGV; http://cmbipc49.cmbi.kun.nl/genome) is a free, open-source program t

THE KEYS TO CAGE© 2003 National Academy of Sciencesand its competitors are a 5' cap-trapping step and a class II restriction enzyme (MmeI), which cleaves DNA 20/18 bp downstream of the recognition site to create the sequence tag. (Reprinted from T. Shiraki, Proc Nat Acad Sci, 100:15776–81, 2003.)Serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) has been used extensively to map and quantify transcripts in different tissues. But the technique, which extracts short oligos (14–21 bp long) f

The public has been slow to embrace the word “genome” because of a continuing confusion with the term “genetic code.”