If you want to know how biology will be practiced in the coming decades, check out a recent National Academy of Sciences colloquium on frontiers in bioinformatics.

DigitalVisionPhysically and behaviorally, few creatures have been measured, tested, and probed as much as the laboratory mouse. Yet what do scientists know about making mice happy or free of pain? Often, the answer is not nearly enough. This is a knowledge vacuum with ethical and experimental ramifications.Pain management and environmental enrichment are hot topics in laboratory animal science. They are also conundrums defying easy fixes. Researchers may want to mitigate pain and suffering in th

By conscious design, plant genomics initiatives have devoted initial resources to new technology development. Part of that money went to developing functional genomics approaches, and part to new sequencing technologies.

Courtesy of European Bioinformatics Institute  KNOWLEDGE GAPS? Sequence alignments offer clues to both the function and evolution of novel genes. But a bewildering array of algorithms and parameters leaves many researchers unable to use these programs to their fullest potential. In the beginning, there was Needleman-Wunsch, which begat Smith-Waterman, which begat FASTA, which begat BLAST, and so on. Peel away the information technology jargon surrounding these alignment algorithms, and a

Erica P. Johnson In the early days of American television, the late Steve Allen created a comic persona called "Question Man." An expert in whatever, Question Man contended that the public was so well-informed, knowing more answers than questions, that it was leaving many answers unquestioned. So, Question Man invited his audience to send him answers out-of-context, and he provided the questions. They were the punch lines. Today the soaring medium is the Internet, where hundreds of molecular

Courtesy of FRIZ Biochem A microarray substrate and reader for EDDA technology A small German biotechnology company is literally going for the gold in the burgeoning market for DNA microarray systems. FRIZ Biochem of Munich is developing two new electrochemical DNA microarray readout products that will use gold-coated chips for analyzing batches of genes. Simpler to use and less expensive than state-of-the-art fluorescent technology, the systems could be a boon for small to medium-sized

Courtesy of Pierce Biotechnology Though well traveled, the road to two-dimensional gel analysis can be slow going. Pierce Biotechnology in Rockford, Ill., has looked to the past in developing four new sample preparation kits for nuclear, membrane, soluble, and insoluble proteins. According to the company, these kits reduce preparation time and improve gel-to-gel reproducibility. All four kits remove salts from extracted proteins and concentrate them to produce a sample suitable for electropho

Courtesy of Active Motif One challenge in working with a family of homologous genes is finding a reagent that can silence one gene without acting on its brethren. This is a question of specificity, and Active Motif of Carlsbad, Calif., claims its gripNA™ probes are more specific than conventional antisense oligonucleotide reagents and more effective than the peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) from which gripNAs derive. Although PNAs exhibit strong hybridization and specificity properties, the

"Save the mice" may sound like an animal rights slogan, but it is smart science to researchers in the Comparative Mouse Genomics Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. A major drawback of working with laboratory mice is having to kill the animals to measure endpoints such as tumor development and bone loss. Director Warren Ladiges, a veterinarian, and his colleagues are trying to save mice--and the cost of replacing them--by developing noninvasive techniques for whole-body imaging

Photo: Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Measuring the faint expression of a low-level protein in a complex biological system is a bit like playing Where's Waldo in a moving picture with tens of thousands of extras. Without technology that can process the system quickly, accurately, and repeatedly, there's no telling how long each investigation will take. Scientists at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., report t