Looking for a little island property near the Hamptons in New York? How about a charming old Biosafety Level 3 facility? Plum Island Animal Disease Center Image: Wikipedia The US government is taking steps to sell Plum Island Animal Disease Center, the government-run lab which has conducted experiments on pathogens such as foot and mouth disease. The town board of Southold in Long Island, New York, received a visit this week from representatives of the United States General Services Administrat

By Alla Katsnelson Adaptive Evolution A once-rare type of clinical trial that violates one of the sacred tenets of trial design is taking off, but is it worth the risk? Doriano Solinas When researchers at Pfizer first began a Phase 2 trial of an acute stroke therapy in 2000, they decided to take a novel approach. The study—called the ASTIN trial—would determine the drug’s optimal dose not with three or four diffe

Researchers are puzzling out a central mechanism for how some proteins navigate inside bacterial cells: Rather than using biochemical cues, they appear to rely on the cells' geometry, sensing the membrane's curvature, two recent studies suggest. Gram-stained Bacillus subtilis Image: Wikipedia "This is an important and fundamental observation," said linkurl:Lucy Shapiro;http://devbio1.stanford.edu/usr/ls/ at Stanford University, who did not participate in the research. Because bacterial cel

A government report to be released later this week slams the plan to build a contested high security pathogen lab in Kansas, saying the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not properly evaluate the risks of conducting such research in the mainland, the linkurl:Washington Post reports.;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/26/AR2009072602857_pf.html The report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the idea of building the National Bio and Agro Defense F

By Alla Katsnelson Gut Churning The discovery of an intestinal stem cell marker fuels an ongoing debate over the cells' location and properties. GFP-labeled Lgr5-positive cells in the crypt base of the mouse intestine Courtesy of Nick Barker and Hugo Snippert Mammalian intestinal epithelium is one of the most swiftly self-renewing tissues in the body, turning over completely every 3 to 5 days. Because of the absence

In a new initiative that aims to forge broader partnerships between pharma and academia, Eli Lilly has announced that it will conduct free drug development assays in four therapeutic areas on any compounds academic researchers and small biotechs care to send along. In exchange, the company will get first dibs on any licensing deals or collaborations that promising compounds might yield. What differentiates this initiative from the plethora of partnering opportunities out there, Alan Palkowitz,

Fat cells have long been considered to be mere filler in bone marrow, but linkurl:a study published online today;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08099.html in Nature reports that these cells serve an important function -- namely, they put the brakes on blood formation. Grey's Anatomy illustrationof human bone marrow Image: Wikipedia "I think it's fundamentally important," linkurl:Sean Morrison,;http://www.med.umich.edu/cdb/sub_pages/people/morrison.htm director of

By Alla Katsnelson Lac on, lac off © Phantatomix / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: J. Elf et al., "Probing transcription factor dynamics at the single-molecule level in a living cell," Science, 316:1191–94, 2007. (Cited in 65 papers) The finding: Using fluorescence imaging, a Harvard team led by Sunney Xie quantified the kinetics of the lac operon repressor protein in Escherichia coli in real time. They showed that t

A collaboration between a composer and his neuroscientist muse probes one of life's deepest questions

LOV story Even nonphotosynthetic bacteria respond to light in surprising ways. Have scientists found a new ubiquitous signaling mechanism? By Alla Katsnelson Original image: © Yves Brun / artistically modified by The Scientist aulobacter crescentus isn't much to look at. When you peek through a microscope at 630-times magnification, the freshwater bacteria appear as a swarm of little gray, kidney-shaped creatures fli

A much-contested plan to build a $450 million government biodefense research lab has hit another snag: A group of Texas research organizations that lobbied for San Antonio to house the lab says it will sue the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its choice of site -- Manhattan, Kansas. Cattle being inspected for ticks Image: USDA, via Wikipedia linkurl:The Texas Biological and Agro-Defense Consortium;http://www.nbafsanantonio.org/aboutTBAC.html earlier this week (April 22) filed a notic

New findings are calling into question a long-held theory for how a dividing cell decides to stop the process of mitosis and restart the cell cycle. Chromosomes (blue) and mitoticspindle (green) during cell division Image: Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab, via Wikipedia Science textbooks have long claimed that what drives this decision is the breakdown of cell cycle-related proteins called cyclins at the end of the cycle's mitosis phase, but a linkurl:study published online;http://www.nature.com/nature/jou