Thom Graves MediaThe audience, several hundred biophysicists strong, was not expecting a James Brown impersonation. But there he was: Physiologist Yale Goldman, keynote speaker on motility at the Biophysical Society's annual meeting, doing his "asymmetric hand-over-hand motility dance with a limp" to tinny strains of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." And while Goldman, who eschewed Brown's trademark, over-the-top couture for understated, Ivy League-issue khakis and blue blazer, won't star on MTV any

Most bioinformatics programs churn out raw text files bursting with data, but devoid of interpretation. Programmers spend much of their time slogging through these files-computationally speaking – to extract useful information. For nearly 10 years, the bioperl project http://www.bioperl.org has labored to relieve bioinformaticians of this burden, building an object-oriented toolkit that handles the nitty gritty of data format and access so that developers can concentrate on their bioinform

The very act of slicing and dicing a piece of DNA with a restriction enzyme was a noteworthy event at one time. Now, even high school students can do it, and much more besides. If you want to bring molecular biology prowess to your lab but don't know what you'll need, read on. Our primer breaks down the essential enzymatic ingredients for starting your own molecular biology laboratory.The specific enzymes required for any project will depend on what you're doing, and companies such as Ambion, Am

The very act of slicing and dicing a piece of DNA with a restriction enzyme was a noteworthy event at one time. Now, even high school students can do it, and much more besides. If you want to bring molecular biology prowess to your lab but don't know what you'll need, read on. Our primer breaks down the essential enzymatic ingredients for starting your own molecular biology laboratory.The specific enzymes required for any project will depend on what you're doing, and companies such as Ambion, Am

But experts say live animal assay is far off, if attainable at all

"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."--Winston Churchill Centrifuges, imaging systems, pipettes, PCR instruments, microscopes, and more--all indispensable components of the scientist's toolbox. They make science happen. Moreover, they make science compelling. Why else would television programs such as CSI and The X-Files devote so much screen time to such high-tech gadgetry? Most labs have these things, and naturally, researchers have their preferences. So, like last year, we

Research Briefs Cancer Cook-Off; Faculty of 1000 | Interdisciplinary Research; Sir2, In Flagrante Delicto Cancer Cook-Off © 2003 National Academy of Sciences, USA In a departure from traditional Texas barbecue, researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, both in Houston, recently showed that they could literally cook cancer cells to death, using nanotechnology. Rice bioengineer Jennifer West and colleagues demonstrated that an injection of so

CDC, USDA to offer provisional clearances if background checks remain incomplete

US agencies have completed only about half of inspections as Nov 12 deadline looms

Frontlines | The Sounds of Science Courtesy of Nina Seiler What's the sound of two molecules touching? Ask James La Clair and Michael Burkart, two University of California, San Diego, scientists, who recently developed a biosensor on the surface of an ordinary compact disc. Data from a CD is nothing more than a stream of 1s and 0s, the digital representation of how laser light reflects off the disc's aluminum platter. Any dust or scratch on the CD's surface produces errors in the playback;

Courtesy of Evident Technologies High-resolution fluorescence micro-scopy has revolutionized cell biology, most agree. But the revolution has not come without sacrifice. The enabling equipment--excitation sources, optics, and photodetection hardware--is expensive, and the necessary fluorescent dyes and proteins are relatively photo-unstable. Moreover, because of overlapping absorption and emission profiles, traditional fluorescent markers support only limited multiplexing; that is, researcher

Courtesy of Andrew Gooley, Proteome Systems Among proteomics techniques, protein microarrays may be getting a lot of buzz these days, but two-dimensional gels still do most of the work. That's because protein arrays present a number of technical challenges that have limited their implementation.1 Proteins vary wildly in stability, solubility, viscosity, and ease of synthesis, for instance. And, the in vitro translated proteins generally used to construct protein biochips often lack the wide d