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Courtesy of the Michael H. Malim LabFor about 10 years, our laboratory had been trying to elucidate why the HIV Vif protein is essential for virus replication. Since 1998, we had suspected that Vif 's role was to inhibit a cellular protein that naturally blocks infection. This scintillation counter printout from December 2001 shows that varying amounts of a candidate inhibitor gene we had identified, called APOBEC3G/CEM15, profoundly suppress infection (measured as radioactivity in the CPM colum

INDUCING DISTINCT YEAST PRION STRAINS:©2004 Nature Publishing Group[PSI+] using amyloid fibers derived from a recombinant Sup35p fragment [Sup-NM] at 4°C, 23°C and 37°C. White and pink and/or sectored colonies are strong and weak [PSI+] variants, respectively. (Nature, 428:323–7, 2004)In the relative quiet following the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United Kingdom, BSE returned to the headlines recently with a sole case found in the United States a

Courtesy Jean-Robert Brisson NRC Inst. Biological SciencesCD8+ T-cell tolerance of tumors can block an aggressive immune response against cancer and may diminish the efficacy of therapeutic vaccines. But Yiping Yang, a Duke University immunologist, says he and his colleagues have found a way to overcome T-cell tolerance using the immune system's innate response to pathogens. Membrane-bound Toll-like receptors (TLRs) detect repetitive epitopes commonly found in pathogens. Activating these recepto

Courtesy of Cristina K. MoreiraAt least two years ago, scientists began creating genetically engineered mosquitoes with reduced capacity to transmit malarial parasites. But recent studies offer mixed messages as to whether bio-engineered skeeters can compete in the wild.In a laboratory study with Anopheles stephensi, Case Western Reserve University's Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena and colleagues showed that a transgene encoding the protein SM1, which interrupts parasite development, did not affect mosqui

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.G. Hutvágner et al., "Sequence-specific inhibition of small RNA function," PLoS Biol, 2:E98, April, 2004.Hutvágner et al. have shown that 2'-O-methyl oligonucleotides stoichiometrically and irreversibly inhibit the activity of [microRNAs and small interfering RNAs], paving the way for rapid evaluation of their in vivo functions. Further, they

Courtesy of DefiniensBromodeoxyuridine-stained tissue of mouse small intestine (original image, left; and Cellenger analysis, right). Cellenger has extracted whole crypts on a larger scale and distinguishes between mitotic and non-mitotic nuclei on a smaller scale.Propelled by the pharmaceutical industry, the high-content imaging field has experienced rapid growth, with several major new instrument releases in the past two years. High-throughput image analysis has lagged behind, however, because

Courtesy of Lyncean TechnologiesAdvanced synchrotron radiation sources have revolutionized structural biology, allowing X-ray crystallographers to solve complex macromolecular structures. But as few of these soccer field-sized facilities exist worldwide, researchers have only limited access to them. Now researcher Ronald Ruth at the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center has designed and is currently building a new desktop-sized synchrotron source called the Compact Light Source (CLS) tha

Courtesy of AffymetrixMicroarray giant Affymetrix http://www.affymetrix.com of Santa Clara, Calif., is raising the bar for whole-genome association studies. The first in a planned line of related products, the two-array GeneChip® Mapping 100K set can genotype over 100,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 10 times more than its predecessor could.About half of the SNPs on the 100K set come from public databases. The rest stem from a proprietary database developed by Perlegen Sciences o

One day my adviser asked me to accompany him to an unoccupied lab whose former occupant had retired. It was like entering a well-appointed haunted house: glassware on the shelves, awaiting use; chemicals in the hood, fuming; gel boxes idling on the bench. It was a lab, but its eeriness was unsettling; it felt somehow wrong to be there without the owner. I was snapped out of my thoughts by my adviser, who turned suddenly and asked, "What do you think of this centrifuge?" Now I understood why we h

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