Geneticist whose discoveries in yeast profoundly influenced cell science dies at 56.

Ceremony honoring scientists and educators acknowledges history and looks to the future.

Courtesy of Guy Caldwell CLEARING THE DRAIN: (Left) The worm expresses polyglutamine GFP in both the presence and absence of torsin. (Right) A Caenorhabditis elegans torsin protein, TOR-2 (red), localizes to sites of polyglutamine green fluorescent protein (GFP) aggregation (green) in a worm cell. A movement disorder can start as a twinge. A child's leg turns in while walking. Writing becomes difficult, painful. For many, these types of diseases--broadly termed dystonias--progress no fur

Celebrations for DNA and its sequence in humans.

5-Prime | X-Ray-ted: A Crystal-Clear Lexicon Courtesy of Steve Ealick Crystal structures may clarify molecular organization, but the papers describing them are often so chock-full of jargon that they're largely unintelligible to those outside the crystallography field. Here are five prime definitions to get started. Phase Problem: Crystallographers blast their crystals with X-rays and record the patterns of diffracted radiation. The intensities of diffracted X-rays give information about

Courtesy of Kelly Guenther MOLECULAR DYNAMIC DUO: David Cowburn, president and CEO at the New York Structural Biology Center, and Willa Appel, executive vice president and COO. Ann E. McDermott, a Columbia University chemist, encountered a career crisis a little more than four years ago. Her cramped campus couldn't facilitate the kind of technology she needed to remain at the top of her field. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers require money and space. Money was available. Re

Front Page | DNA Detection Without PCR; Sequence-Analysis Beerware; Shuffling the Genome Deck Courtesy of AcaClone Software SOFTWARE WATCH | Sequence-Analysis Beerware DNA sequence analysis software needn't be expensive. For a decade, molecular biologist Kjeld Olesen has spent much of his spare time developing pDRAW32, a free sequence-analysis software package for Windows PCs. Researchers can perform restriction enzyme analyses, edit sequences, create plasmid maps, cut and ligate "in silico

Front Page | Science Seen; Models and Targets; Interdisciplinary Research SCIENCE SEEN Courtesy of Science Photo Library ROCKETTES MATERIAL? This diatom, belonging to the Bacillariophyceae class of minute planktonic unicellular or colonial algae, could be called the daddy longlegs of the unicellular marine world. Found in plankton, this Bacteriastrum delicatulum has very ornate cell walls made of silica; its legs may aid flotation. Plankton forms the basis for the entire marine food ch

Front Page | An Eternal Fluorescent Protein; Model Behavior; Compacting DNA Shrinks Gene Therapy Barriers Reprinted with permission J Biol Chem, 275:25879-82, 2000. GADGET WATCH | An Eternal Fluorescent Protein? Researchers at Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Moscow who developed the fluorescent protein DsRed are tinkering with a new chromoprotein with some unique properties.1 Discovered in the sea anemone, Anemonia sulcata (at left), this GFP-like protein, ca

Frontlines | Collaborations Become Innate Courtesy of The Scripps Research Institute A five-year, $24 million National Institutes of Health grant to study innate immunity could supply a bounty of new reagents and animal models as well as a free database of experimental information to immunologists. Innate immunity, the once unappreciated first-line defense against infections, has recently been implicated in sepsis and inflammatory disorders such as Crohn disease. As more scientists got hook

Erica P. Johnson Systems biologists envision a hulking database where all biological knowledge can be stored, freely accessed, and designed to interact. From it, researchers could easily extract data to construct virtual molecular pathway models working in their respective networks and in dynamic contexts of time, space, and various environmental cues. Hypotheses could be plucked like apples from the electronic tree of knowledge, and drug targets would fall like leaves. Some want to play out

5-Prime | The Histone Code Courtesy of IMP/TKadletz What is the histone code? Different chemical marks, such as acetylation, methylation, or phosphorylation, are made to numerous residues on the N-terminal tails of histone proteins. Some posit that they act as readable and specific landing pads for proteins that control chromatin modeling and transcriptional regulation. The marks appear to be clustered in different regulatory groups signifying "on" and "off" portions of the genome, and som