Biotech tools company Invitrogen has appointed a team charged with integrating the company's operations with those of Applied Biosystems (AB), another biotech tools company, which Invitrogen linkurl:acquired last week;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54747/ in a deal valued at a whopping $6.7 billion. The announcement, made today (June 20) in a linkurl:press release,;http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=61498&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1168183&highlight= marks the first step in the

Glial cells, long thought to be supporting actors to neurons, play a crucial role of their own in regulating neuronal activity, according to a study published in Science this week. The study's results suggest that glial cells provide the link between neurons and the vasculature in the brain and central nervous system, and posit that the nervous system is controlled in a more complex manner than previously thought. "For a hundred years, we have known that glia existed," said linkurl:Mriganka Su

Chimeric mice generated from cells reprogrammed for pluripotency (induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells) show significant health problems, pointing to further challenges that must be overcome before such cells can be used in the clinic, noted iPS researcher Shinya Yamanaka said on Saturday (June 14). Speaking at the linkurl:meeting;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54746/ of the linkurl:International Society for Stem Cell Research;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54749/

Bipedal reptiles caught on film hint at locomotion mysteries

The US Senate today (June 11) plans to introduce a biosafety bill that takes small steps towards resolving some controversial aspects of the system regulating research with agents that could be used for bioterrorism. The regulations, called the Select Agent Program, have been controversial since they were established in 2002. Researchers have said that the rules linkurl:created red tape;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14717/ that stymied research, hindered international collaborati

With blockbuster drug patents set to expire in the next few years, big pharma is looking hard for ways to pack the discovery pipeline. One approach: the biotech model. Patrick Vallance, the head of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline, said at a meeting on Friday (June 6) that research at the company would be reorganized to be "more biotech-like," the Financial Times linkurl:reported.;http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a36193c0-366e-11dd-8bb8-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 He said the plan was to split

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not demonstrated that moving foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) research from an island lab in New York to a linkurl:new mainland animal research facility;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23091/ would be safe, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told a Congressional committee this morning (May 22). "We found that linkurl:DHS;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54186/ has not conducted or commissioned any study" to assess whether

The third annual Neurotech Industry meeting in Boston kicked off yesterday morning (May 8) with some big numbers: * Two billion people each year are affected by brain-related illnesses, from stroke to depression to chronic pain, with an economic loss worldwide of about $2 trillion. * Venture capital companies invested about $1.77 billion in neuroscience-related research last year. * Worldwide, neuro-related industry profits hit $130.5 billion in 2007-- a growth of 8% from the previous year.

BrainCells, a company that stakes its existence on the once-heretical notion of linkurl:adult neurogenesis,;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/12172/ is finally taking its novel treatment for depression into a phase II trial, CEO Jim Schoeneck told me at a neurotechnology meeting in Boston yesterday (May 8). Researchers have recently begun to suspect that treating depression requires neurogenesis. Drugs such as Prozac, though, stimulate nerve growth via the serotonin pathway, which

Microbes may have the capacity for a type of learning generally attributed to higher organisms, suggests a linkurl:paper;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1154456 published online in Science today (May 8). "We have to start to think about bacterial behavior in a more sophisticated way," said linkurl:Saeed Tavazoie;http://genomics.princeton.edu/tavazoie/web/homes.html of Princeton University, who led the study. Researchers have long assumed that microbes respond to changes in the

Crossing Arabidopsis Strains Kirsten Bomblies, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany, conducted hundreds of intraspecies crosses of Arabidopsis thaliana. Approximately 2% of these hybrids develop varying degrees of necrosis that appears to be caused by gene interactions that produce an autoimmune-like response. (Images originally published in PLoS Biol 5(9): e236, 2007) var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist

A normal Arabidopsis plant (center), surrounded by different hybrids formed by crossing two healthy plants. Credit: Kirsten Bomblies and Detlef Weigel, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen" />A normal Arabidopsis plant (center), surrounded by different hybrids formed by crossing two healthy plants. Credit: Kirsten Bomblies and Detlef Weigel, Max Planck