Four weeks after Erich Wanker?s team published its human interactome paper, Marc Vidal?s group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has followed suit. In today?s (Sept. 28) online edition of Nature Vidal?s team reports its analysis of interactions between 8,100 or so human open reading frames corresponding to some 7,200 protein-coding genes. From that ?search space? of 7,200 x 7,200, or nearly 52 million combinations, the group used a high-throughput yeast two-hybrid approach to ide

I never thought I'd say this, but I participated in a flash mob last night (Sept. 15). We didn?t congregate on a street corner and start chanting or anything like that. Instead, we solved a molecular dynamics problem. ?Flash mob computing?, the brainchild of Patrick J. Miller, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, is a way to build ad hoc supercomputers from unused desktop and laptop computers. Arrayed in the M. Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr College were nine "slave" laptops under

It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Functional genomicists took that proverbial step earlier this month when a group led by Erich Wanker, of Berlin?s Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, reported the first yeast two-hybrid-derived human interactome (or protein-protein interaction) network in the September 1 online issue of Cell.Wanker was one of three researchers working on a first draft human interactome identified by Alison McCook in our

In tomorrow's (July 1) issue of Genes & Development, Siu Sylvia Lee, of the department of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and Gary Ruvkun, of the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School, report ?the first genome-wide functional genomic screen for longevity genes.? The two teams used a library of 16,475 RNA interference constructs (created by Julie Ahringer at the University of Cambridge, UK) to inactivate genes in the nematode, Caenorhabditis eleg

At the BIO 2005 conference earlier this week I participated in a panel discussion entitled "Guerrilla Media Tactics: Getting MORE Media Attention Without News." Part of the Public Relations/Investor Relations track, this session probably flew below the radar of most scientists attending the conference. But there were plenty of corporate communication- and PR-types in the audience.The panel, consisting of yours truly plus writers and editors from Fortune magazine, the Wall Street Journal Onli