Physical therapy and exercise are critical to the success of cell therapies approaching the clinic.

Regenerative rehabilitation promises to enhance the potential of cell- and gene-based techniques by incorporating principles of physical therapy.
 

While mulling over ideas for a group project in a graduate-level class in community ecology in 2007, PhD student Ryan O’Donnell recalled a question that had been nagging him for years.

By Andrew Mangravite and Elie Dolgin Merrifield Peptide Synthesizer, circa 1964 Gift of Elizabeth Merrifield, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. Photograph by Gregory Tobias In 1901, the German chemist Emil Fischer synthesized the first pure dipeptide molecule; more than half a century later, most chemists were still using the same technique of adding and removing chemical accessories called “protecting groups” to the rea

Disagreement over how older influenza drugs stop the virus is stymieing efforts to find new compounds

By Elie Dolgin Sheng Ding: As Cell Fate Would Have It © JEFFREY LAMONT BROWN When Sheng Ding was applying for graduate school, there was only one person he considered working with: chemical biologist Peter Schultz. Ding, trained as a chemist, saw Schultz’s lab at the Scripps Research Institute as the perfect place to apply his knowledge of organic synthesis to biological problems. “I was certainly narrow-minded,” Di

Scientists are trying to design the last malaria control agent the world will ever need.

By Elie Dolgin You give me fever James Gathany / CDC The paper: V. Nene et al., “Genome sequence of Aedes aegypti, a major arbovirus vector,” Science, 316:1718–23, 2007. (Cited in 100 papers) The finding: Five years after scientists sequenced the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Notre Dame released the genetic blueprint of

By Elie Dolgin Deconstructing structure Courtesy of Jonathan Pritchard The paper: D. Falush et al., “Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data: dominant markers and null alleles,” Mol Ecol Notes, 7:574–78, 2007. (Cited in 91 papers) The finding: University College Cork’s Daniel Falush and the University of Chicago’s Jonathan Pritchard updated a widely used comp

By Elie Dolgin Down memory lane © Marc Phares / Photo Researchers, Inc The paper: A. Fischer et al., “Recovery of learning and memory is associated with chromatin remodeling,” Nature, 447:178–82, 2007. (Cited in 82 papers) The finding: Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that mentally stimulating environment caused chromatin modifications that restored learning and lo

By Elie Dolgin C. elegans Physical Map, circa 1989 © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library By the 1980s, Sydney Brenner’s “worm project” was in full swing. Brenner and his crack team of researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, had already constructed a detailed genetic map of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and described the worm’s embryonic and nervous system development i

By Elie Dolgin Next top model A mouse lung riddled with tumors after inhaling Cre recombinase. Courtesy of David Dankort David Dankort was 4 years into his postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, without a single paper to show for his work since his PhD. His first two major projects had failed, and if his third experiment didn’t pan out, he was ready to kiss his academic career goodbye. In a last-ditch effort, Dankort had constructed tra