During most of the 1990s, a linguistic chasm divided the worlds of flies, worms, mice, and other model organisms.

Traditional gene therapy is built on a simple premise: If the absence of a gene product causes disease, then adding the missing gene will cure it.

Professors P. Motta & T. Naguro/Photo ResearchersEach of our cells hangs in a delicate balance between life and death. Which path the cell takes depends on a dense web of signaling pathways that all converge on a single cellular switch, the mitochondrion. Most of the time, pro-life signals keep the mitochondrial membrane intact and encourage the organelle to churn out ATP. But when signals from the outside or accumulated toxins within the cell tip the scales, mitochondria push the cell down

PRIMING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM:Thom GravesScientists are working on several approaches to coax the immune system into attacking cancer. Here, artificial antigen-presenting cells are used to stimulate the patient's own tumor-specific T cells.Like a modern army, the human immune system possesses an array of sophisticated cellular and molecular detection systems and weaponry. Against most pathogens these forces mount a formidable defense, but not when the disease in question involves the body's own cell

Courtesy of Cenix BioScience (S. Doering)When Andrew Fire of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, set out to understand some confusing results obtained with antisense RNA in 1998,1 he could not have known he was firing the opening salvo in a biotech revolution. What he stumbled upon was a potent and simple way to knock down gene expression in eukaryotic cells called RNA interference, or RNAi.Researchers in academia and industry alike hitched their wagons to RNAi's star, and in the years f

Figure 1PANDORA'S BOXESContainment cabinets in a BSL-3 laboratory, prior to the construction of modern BSL-4 labs.At first glance, the lab looks like any other. The refrigerators, centrifuges, and computers are all standard equipment, as are the ubiquitous work hoods. Even the fluorescent lighting and lack of windows are standard issue. It's the coiled air hoses, dangling from the ceiling – and maybe the air-locked, submarine style door that is the lab's only exit – that first betray

Click for larger version of in vitro transcription/translation diagrams (57K) Cells are, at a fundamental level, protein-production facilities. So naturally, when researchers need to make some particular protein, they should let the cells do the work for them. But living cells are not terribly good at making exogenous proteins; some proteins are toxic, while others are degraded or simply clumped into insoluble aggregates called inclusion bodies. These days, scientists sometimes take a minima

Courtesy of SRI International  METABOLITES GO 'OMIC': Metabolomics researchers seek to catalog and quantify the myriad small molecules found in biological fluids. Such molecules stem from biological pathways, whose complexity and interrelationships are neatly captured in this depiction of SRI International's BioCyc database. The dots represent individual metabolites and the lines represent enzymatic reactions that interconvert the metabolites. The circle surrounding the pathways depicts th

In autoimmune diseases, CD4+ T cells targeted to self- antigens multiply and attack the body's own tissues. The resulting inflammation and cell damage leads to disease such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. Now Beckman Coulter Immunomics Operations of San Diego offers a new tool: class II iTAg™ major histocompatibility complex (MHC) tetramers, which allow researchers to quantify CD4+ T cells directed against specific antigens. Complementing the company's

Photo: Courtesy of Hewlett-Packard/Compaq The world's fastest supercomputer--Japan's Earth Simulator--occupies an area equivalent to four tennis courts on three floors. It contains 5,120 processors, 10 terabytes of memory, 700 terabytes of hard disk space, and it can perform 40 trillion floating point operations every second. The computer's performance exceeds that of the world's 18 next-fastest computers. It also cost an estimated $350 million (US). Japanese scientists use this supercomputer

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 30 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Mitochondria: Cellular Energy Co. Researchers strive to keep the energy pipeline open in the face of damaging cellular insults | By Amy Adams Where fossil fuels power the world, mitochondria power the cell. They provide the energy that allows your eyes to scan this page, and fuel each nerve impulse as your brain processes the words. Mu

The human genome is much like the American West of the 1850s: Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Similar to gold prospectors of 150 years ago, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and even universities, are frantically searching for the nuggets of gold that will help them find the mother lode—a gene whose function is sufficiently marketable to make all of the preliminary research worthwhile. Companies that do strike gold get to introduce new classes of drugs to the market. Others hope to