Articles by Jeffrey Perkel

has grown dramatically in size and influence. The database has expanded from 1.4 million citations in 1964 to 550 million today.

Your stem cells have just arrived.

When the graduate students and postdocs in Martin Wilson's lab at the University of California, Davis, need to do image processing, they look to an unlikely source.

For untenured professors, the pressure to publish is intense.

Given accelerated approval in 1996, the chemotherapy drug irinotecan (Camptosar) can attack metastatic colorectal cancers that don't respond to other drugs.

Invitrogen wins big in first annual Life Science Industry Awards

In terms of innovation, the life science industry has few peers.

Step into any molecular and cellular biology laboratory anywhere in the world, and chances are you'll see an ultracentrifuge sitting somewhere nearby. Figuring prominently in the purification protocols for everything from DNA and protein to Golgi and mitochondria, these machines rely on the same physical principle that makes children giddy on playground carousels: As the rotor (or carousel) spins, objects are pushed away from its axis of rotation via centrifugal force. In a carousel, that force

In the world of fluorescent labels, organic dyes are out, and quantum dots (QDs) are in. These nanosize crystals of semiconducting material (typically CdSe) sport a broad excitation profile, strong fluorescence, enviable photostability, and narrow, size-dependent emission spectra. QDs are ideally suited for most multiplexed fluorescence applications, but not for fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET).Because different QDs will fluoresce under the same excitation wavelength, they cannot fu

The genomics revolution that reached its climax in 2000 owes its very existence to two men. The first is Frederick Sanger who in 1977 developed the method for DNA sequencing that now bears his name. The second is Leroy Hood, who (with colleagues Michael Hunkapiller and Lloyd Smith) in 1986 took Sanger's method and made it better.Sanger's enzymatic approach relies on specially modified reagents (2',3'-dideoxynucleotide triphosphates) whose incorporation into a growing DNA strand terminates the ex

Nuclear magnetic resonance papers read like a veritable alphabet soup. There's NOESY, COSY, TOESY, and ROESY; HMQC, HMBC, HSQC, and DEPT. And let's not forget INEPT, INADEQUATE, EXSY, and SECSY.It's enough to make a biologist squirm. Yet fundamentally, these experiments all take advantage of a relatively simple physical phenomenon. Anybody who has ever turned a nail into a magnet by wrapping it with electrical wire knows magnetism and electricity are inextricably linked. NMR spectroscopists expl

© Kenneth Eward/BioGrafx/Photo Researchers, Inc.Ten years from now, a visit to the doctor could be quite different than it is today. How different? Imagine tiny particles that "cook" cancers from the inside out; "smart bomb" drugs that detonate only over their targets; and finely structured scaffolds that guide tissue regeneration.But it's not just imagination. In academic labs, small startups, and giant pharmaceutical companies, researchers in the blossoming field of nanotechnology have sh

Courtesy of OncomineEach week it seems a new study comes out about applying DNA microarrays to cancer. The data are generally publicly accessible, but not conveniently so, as they are scattered about the Web or available only by E-mail.Arul Chinnaiyan, director of the University of Michigan Pathology Microarray Center in Ann Arbor, decided to collect all the data and put it in a single place, along with some bioinformatics tools to help cancer biologists interpret the information.The result is O

Nearly 35 years since Stanford researcher Leonard Herzenberg and colleagues developed the first fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS), the instrument has become the immunologists' key tool. Immunology journals are chock-full of flow-cytometry profiles, the characteristic plots that such instruments produce.But cytometry is just half the story. The instruments also allow researchers to purify specific cell populations based on the presence or absence of particular characteristics. And therein

Fifteen years into the microarray revolution, biochip images – row upon row of red and green spots on a field of black – have become as ubiquitous as DNA gels once were.But how are those pictures generated? Arrays are imaged using one of two classes of equipment: array imagers and array scanners. Both use lasers to excite the fluorphors on the chip, but where imagers capture a snapshot of the glowing array using a charge-coupled device (CCD camera), scanners read the chip point-by-po