By Alla Katsnelson Package delivery Courtesy of John HeissYour body is teeming with mysterious particles called vaults. With an average of 10,000 to 100,000 of them in every human cell, they’re thought to be one of the most abundant particles in the body. But no one knows their function. This mystery doesn’t phase the discoverer of vaults, University of California, Los Angeles cell biologist Leonard Rome. To him, what matters about vaults is no

NIH tweaks stem cell rulesThe US National Institutes of Health on Friday (Feb 19) proposed a change to its definition of a human embryonic stem cell. Presently, stem cell lines are defined as being derived from a blastocyst-stage embryo. The proposed revision would amend that wording to "up to and including the blastocyst stage." The policy, published in the linkurl:Federal Register,;http://www.federalregister.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2010-03527_PI.pdf is open for public comment. The issue was rais

Biology department casualtiesThe Chronicle of Higher Education has posted linkurl:remembrances;http://chronicle.com/article/Remembering-the-Victims/64199/ of the three researchers killed on Friday when Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, opened fire in a faculty meeting, reportedly because she had been denied tenure. linkurl:Media reports;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/us/15alabama.html?ref=us revealed this weekend that Bishop had fatally

Pharma research jobs on the chopping blockAnnouncements of job loss in big pharma continue, with the UK press saying that GlaxoSmithKline will soon announce 4,000 layoffs, nearly half in R&D. linkurl:(The Guardian);http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/health/article7010418.ece AstraZeneca said last week it would cut 8000 jobs, 3,500 of them in R&D, and noted plans to outsource more of its research and trim the number of disease areas on which the company focuses. linku

Need a gene promoter? You may soon be able to order one from a catalog. California synthetic biologists are launching a linkurl:production facility;http://www.biofab.org/ that will provide free, standardized DNA parts for scientists around the world. A light programmable biofilm madeby the UT Austin / UCSF team, iGEM 2004 Image: Wikipedia The project, called BIOFAB: International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology -- or just BIOFAB for short -- aims to boost the ease of bioengineering with

- Is the US Food and Drug Administration's 2006 initiative to gain approval for old drugs that predate the current approval process boosting safety or just inflating the cost of such medicines, asks linkurl:an article;http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-unapproved-drugs18-2010jan18,0,7696622.story in the LA Times. - Researchers have launched linkurl:an open access database;http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2010/WTX058219.htm of more than 520,000 small molecule

-A newly released linkurl:government report;http://www.hhs.gov/aspr/omsph/biosecurity/biosecurity-report.pdf calls for changing the rules for conducting research on certain biological materials that could potentially be used as bioterror agents. Though the current list of "select agents" includes 82 pathogens and toxins, the report says, they don't all pose the same level of threat; the panel recommended stratifying the list based on the level of risk. The report also calls for beefing up securi

Cambridge-based biotech Biogen Idec, the maker of the multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri, linkurl:announced;http://investor.biogenidec.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=148682&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1370474&highlight=] yesterday that its president and CEO, James Mullen, will retire in June. The search is on for a new head. Mullen rose through the ranks at Biogen after coming on as director of facilities and engineering in 1989. He became head of Biogen in 2000, and kept that post when Biogen merged with San Die

Perhaps more so than most years to date, 2009 has repeatedly raised the specter of misdeeds in research -- both in academia and industry. New year's celebrations in Taipei Image: Wikimedia CommonsWith more and more academic research linkurl:funded by industry;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55506/ and few universities having consistent policies on how their researchers must report their financial ties, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) this year linkurl:continued his probe;http://www.t

Neurons in the fly can radically remold their cytoskeleton to rebuild a severed axon -- a finding that might provide clues to how neurons recover from injury, researchers reported yesterday at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Diego. Image: Wikipedia To rebuild the severed axon, neurons in the fly ramp up their production of microtubules -- the main structural elements of the cytoskeleton -- and recreate the microtubules characteristic of the axon in a nearby part of the ce

Pfizer's $68 billion merger with Wyeth, which officially linkurl:commences today,;http://www.pfizer.com/news/press_releases/pfizer_press_releases.jsp?rssUrl=http://mediaroom.pfizer.com/portal/site/pfizer/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1016273&newsId=20091015006478&newsLang=en will mean the loss of almost 20,000 jobs, the company has said, and analysts predict research could take a hard hit. The deal involves combining laboratories of the once-competing companies. Martin Mackay, pres

A two-year battle between the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and biopharma over a much-contested set of patent rules ended yesterday (October 8) when the USPTO linkurl:rescinded the rules altogether.;http://www.uspto.gov/news/09_21.jsp "These regulations have been highly unpopular from the outset and were not well received by the applicant community," said David Kappos, director of the USPTO, in a statement. "In taking the actions we are announcing [October 8], we hope to engage the ap