An industry/academia/government coalition puts microarray reproducibility to the test

There are many ways to observe programmed cell death; here are six of the most common ones

Credit: COURTESY OF MARISA DOLLED-FILHAST, HISTO Rx" /> Credit: COURTESY OF MARISA DOLLED-FILHAST, HISTO Rx Traditional histopathology analysis has two basic problems. First, it isn't granular enough: Pathologists typically grade overall marker-staining intensity using a four-point scale. The other problem is that these measurements don't account for the sometimes-subtle changes in subcellular localization that can indicate disease. Beta-catenin, for instance, is a biomarker for colon can

Credit: © PHOTODISC" /> Credit: © PHOTODISC A new collaborative between the US Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will bring scientific rigor and validation to biomarker research, say the agencies. The Oncology Biomarker Qualification Initiative (OBQI; www.fda.gov/oc/mous/domestic/FDA-NCI-CMS.html) will be "a partnership between these three agencies to really for the first time collectively think about how we creat

Credit: COURTESY OF GREG HAMM" /> Credit: COURTESY OF GREG HAMM In the middle of 1981, Greg Hamm was a 30-year-old software programmer newly hired by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to head up its DNA data library-a database that did not yet exist. So he set about making one. "We had journals publishing sequence data in increasingly small point size type, which was useless," he says. "It was clear that one thing that was needed was a transmission format, a way to send the data f

Trio of papers shed light on the molecular mechanisms underpinning dosage compensation of the X chromosome in male fruit flies

FEATUREHuman Interactome Project Interactome Yields Data, But Is It Significant? An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new basic research and drug targets BY JEFFREY M. PERKELARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Time for a Human Interactome Project?An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new

Prefab kits blunt technical creativity. Have your students devise their own solutions.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN/ACKNOWLEDGMENT: CLAUS LARSEN, BMG LABTECH" /> Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN/ACKNOWLEDGMENT: CLAUS LARSEN, BMG LABTECH View enlarged diagramThe days of single-mode microplate readers are over; multimode readers have taken over the lab. One such instrument, BMG Labtech's PHERAstar (shown here), can acquire fluorescence intensity, fluorescence polarization, time-resolved fluorescence, luminescence, absorbance, and PerkinElmer AlphaSc

Six months later, New Orleans's battered life science community is struggling to recover

So you want your own genome sequenced. What's that going to cost?

These three tech developments could make an appearance on your benchtop this year.