By Elie Dolgin Sequencing soil The paper: L.F.W. Roesch et al., “Pyrosequencing enumerates and contrasts soil microbial diversity,” ISME J , 1:283–90, 2007. (Cited in 57 papers) The finding: A team led by Eric Triplett of the University of Florida pyrosequenced four soil samples from across the Western Hemisphere, three from agricultural sites and one from forest soil, finding that each had more than 25,000 bacterial speci

By Elie Dolgin When the Lévy breaks Wagner T. Cassimiro “Aranha” / Flickr Creative Commons The paper: A.E. Edwards et al., “Revisiting Lévy flight search patterns of wandering albatrosses, bumblebees and deer,” Nature , 449:1044–48, 2007. (Cited in 53 papers) The finding: Andrew Edwards, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, found that earlier reports had mistakenly attributed an optimal search patter

By Elie Dolgin J. Christopher Love: The Nanoimmunologist © 2009 LEAH FASTEN Growing up, J. Christopher Love never imagined that he’d be exploring the intricacies of the immune system as a career. In high school, he developed theoretical designs for molecules that could act as electrical devices at the MITRE Corporation, a government-sponsored defense technology company in Fairfax County, Va. Love says the project helped him “realize that mol

By Elie Dolgin Epigenetic suicide note Epigenetic patterns in this brain could reveal suicidal tendencies. Courtesy of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. Photo by Raja Ouali, Bivouac Studio, 2008 Recently, Moshe Szyf, a McGill University epigeneticist, performed a series of experiments indicating that chemical marks on people’s brain cells can reveal suicidal tendencies long before these peop

By Elie Dolgin Evolving heart In 1948, 5,209 residents of a medium-sized New England town signed up for what would become the longest-running, systematic medical study in the world. The Framingham Heart Study, as it was called, was the first to show that smoking, obesity, and high cholesterol all increased people’s chances of developing heart disease. Six decades on, it’s also the first multigenerational human study to reveal that

By Elie Dolgin Scoring on Sabbaticals How to make the most of the precious time away from your usual duties. © James Steinberg Seven years after landing his first faculty job, and a year after securing tenure, Andrew Hendry earned his first year-long sabbatical, a precious respite from teaching and administrative duties that only comes around a few times in one’s career. Last summer, Hendry, a McGill University evolutionary ecologi

Researchers have coopted DNA for a non-biological use -- sorting carbon nanotubes. A new linkurl:study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7252/abs/nature08116.html reports that synthetic DNA molecules can form paper-like sheets that can be used to separate nanotubes of different diameters, lengths, chiralities, and electronic properties. The study reveals some of "the richness of the structural motifs that nucleic acids may have," said Ming Zheng, a biochemist and materials scientist at

Developmental "noise" -- the imprecision in molecular pathways that leads to minor slip-ups in development -- creates fodder for evolution. That's the conclusion of a linkurl:paper;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature08150.html published online yesterday (July 5) in __Nature__, which shows that a single mutation in bacterial spore formation that affects individuals in different ways generates morphological diversity that can then be genetically fine-tuned to maximize an

Final rules for human embryonic stem (ES) cell research, announced this afternoon (July 6) by the National Institutes of Health, require strict documentation detailing voluntary donation of embryos leftover from in-vitro fertilization procedures, but they also contain a mechanism for approving individual cell lines that don't meet the letter of the law but still adhere to the spirit of informed consent. Human embryonic stem cellsImage: Wikimedia/PLoSThe draft guidelines proposed in April expli

By Elie Dolgin Success with iPSCs The nascent science still has many stumbling blocks to step over before companies can reap the rewards of reprogramming. iPS cells Courtesy of California Institute for Regenerative Medicine A decade ago, the United States granted a series of patents that some say changed the embryonic stem cell (ESC) field forever. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) received three broad patent

By Elie Dolgin First Human Brain Chemicals, 1865–1871 © Science Museum /SSPL In 1864, the German pharmacologist Oscar Liebrich presented a paper at a meeting in Giessen arguing that brain tissue was composed of a single giant molecule called "protagon." Any simpler lipids that chemists were isolating, Liebrich argued, were simply breakdown products of this primary, high-molecular-weight compound. The protagon theo

By Elie Dolgin The number two-ome The first two weeks of samples from Lawrence David (L) and Eric Alm (E). Eric Alm bursts into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab and grabs a small, maroon-colored sports duffel bag. "Give me seven and a half minutes," he says with a sense of urgency. "I'm taking a sample and I know exactly how long that takes me." Into the duffel bag he stuffs a disposable plastic commode about the