1000 Workstation keeps the air out

Courtesy of Won-Ki Huh  LOCAL COLOR: Researchers used librar-ies of tagged proteins to determine where those proteins accumulate, and to what levels. Shown are representative localization (top) and co-localization (bottom) data. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, have probed the yeast proteome in the highest level of detail to date. Using sets of fusion-tagged proteins, the scientists, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators Erin O'Shea and Jonatha

Courtesy of Zachary Knight  BEAUTIFUL CLEAVAGE: Trypsin cleaving a hypothetical protein into smaller fragments with C-terminal phosphorylated residues--a basis for phosphorylation mapping techniques. Proteins communicate with each other through posttranslational modifications, and locating modified sites is a key challenge in proteomics. Phosphorylation, the most common modification by far, is central to cell signaling, and knowledge of where and when proteins are phosphorylated could he

Courtesy of NextGen Sciences As a company that develops breast cancer protein chips, Cambridge, UK-based NextGen Sciences experiences the pitfalls of proteomics research on a daily basis. One of the bottlenecks at the moment, says CEO Kevin Auton, is the need to produce enough different proteins to meet the demands of therapeutic groups both internally and for corporate clients. Resolving complex protein mixtures into their component parts is another ongoing problem. In September, NextGen Sci

Click to view detailed diagram of ATP Binding Cassette Transporters (104K) ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) Transporters are a family of proteins that share fairly conserved ATP binding domains and diverse transmembrane regions. They are found in mutant form in various genetic diseases and are conserved across plants, animals, and prokaryotes (see Hot Papers | A Tale of Two Transporters). Perhaps most startling, though, is the balance sheet. The human's 49 known ABC genes are beat out by fly, worm a

Courtesy of Biometra Biometra's TGradient Things are getting hot in the thermal cycler world. Since The Scientist's last annual review of thermal cyclers,1 a number of vendors have updated their product lines, and several plan to release new products within the next year. With improved user-friendliness and visual appeal, the thermocycler class of 2003 features something for every user. Most thermal cyclers use thermal engines based on the Peltier effect, in which heat is transferred fro

Courtesy of CompuCyte The high-content cell-imaging market is heating up thanks to two new product releases from Cambridge, Mass.-based CompuCyte. The new iCys™ Research Imaging Cytometer and iCyte™ Automated Imaging Cytometer both feature CompuCyte's patented laser scanning cytometry (LSC) technology in an inverted format (i.e., the sample is scanned from below, rather than above), enabling analysis of a wide variety of sample formats and facilitating high-throughput screening. T

Courtesy of Amnis High-throughput cell screening has been, and still is, a cornerstone of fast-paced drug-discovery labs, but nowadays speed is not always enough. Content is key, and a Seattle-based startup company has entered the high-throughput cell imaging market with a novel system that could dramatically increase the amount of information available in a given assay. Amnis' ImageStream™ system combines the throughput of flow cytometry with the imaging power of microscopy to offer fa

5-Prime | Tissue Engineering Trends What is tissue engineering? It's the use of engineering and life sciences principles and methods to obtain a basic understanding of structure-function relationships in novel and pathological mammalian tissues and using biological substitutes to restore, maintain, and improve function. What's new? Researchers have developed products and therapies that include a combination of living cells and biomaterials to repair or replace diseased or damaged tissue.

Ned Shaw Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake describes a gruesome future for organ transplantation: Pigoons, genetically altered pigs that grow surplus human organs. Though this scenario may never come to pass, it is easy to see why the science of human replacement parts ignites the dystopian imagination: It was not too long ago that Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts and coworkers injected a polymer scaffold seeded with cartilage cells into the back of the mouse and created

Courtesy of Cellectricon The beating of a heart, the ability to learn and remember, and the movement of a sperm cell's tail all have at least one thing in common: They depend on the function of ion channels, the membrane proteins that control the flow of ions between cells. Currently the only method for measuring ion channel activity is the patch-clamp method, in which a cell's membrane is pierced by the tip of an electrode-containing micropipette. The electrode detects electrical current pas

Reprinted with permission from AAAS (Science, Vol 301, p.1351, 2003) Researchers in the laboratory of R. Graham Cooks at Purdue University have developed a mass spectrometry-based method of creating protein arrays. The technique, known as ion soft-landing, selects proteins by their mass/charge ratio after ionization and deposits them gently onto a liquid or solid surface.1 After separating and landing a mixture of four proteins by this method, Cooks and colleagues demonstrated that each of th