SUPER GOO: Nanotech and Super Heroes? It's a natural. A nanoscale adhesive, developed by University of Manchester researchers, lets this Spiderman hang with confidence. (Reprinted with permission from Nature Materials, 2:461-63, 2003) Don't look now, but the nanotech revolution is already here. It began as a collection of curiosities: nano-enabled sunscreens, tennis racquets, fishing rods, and stain-resistant pants. And more are coming. Nanotech supporters say the technology will benef

Electrochemical system may give rise to better microbiologic sensors, say study authors

derived approach could offer benefits of viral delivery without adverse effects

GADGET WATCH | Fighting the Membrane Protein-Extraction Blues Courtesy of Geno Technology Efficient extraction of membrane proteins can be a dicey business: Add too little detergent, and you fail to extract the protein; add too much, and purification procedures and downstream applications may be compromised. Geno Technology (www.genotech.com) of St. Louis offers one solution: Optimizer-blueBALLS™, which are glass beads coated with a hydrophobic blue dye that behaves like membrane-bound

A Cro-Magnon Capulet? ©2003 The National Academy of Sciences Long ago, in what is now northwestern Europe, a Neanderthal Romeo and Cro-Magnon Juliet may have met, fallen in love, and had children--or not. Debate rages as to whether human ancestors migrating out of Africa displaced archaic humans like Neanderthals, or mixed with them. A new report lends credence to the displacement camp. Geneticist Giorgio Bertorelle, University of Ferrara, Italy, purified and sequenced segments of mit

GADGET WATCH | Ultrafast Gel Loading Courtesy of Andre Marziali Technicians at the British Columbia Genome Sequence Centre in Vancouver spend hours loading agarose gels for high-throughput, bacterial artificial chromosome fingerprinting. Such repetition cries out for automation, and Andre Marziali, platform director for technology development at GenomeBC, was asked to design a fix. His solution--a "capillary comb loader"--can apply an entire microplate-worth of samples in one shot, reducing

Getty Images In 1925, Drosophila pioneer Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students published their first compendium of fruit fly mutations. Known informally as the "Red Book," the catalog was continuously updated until 1992, by which time it had swelled to more than 1,100 pages. Drosophila needed to go digital. FlyBase went live in 1992. Today, this model organism database (MOD), just one of a growing number of such resources, logs about 30,000 hits per day. The curators of these MODs are biologist

TECH BRIEF | Researchers Map Worm ORFeome Courtesy of Marc Vidal Citing the need to verify genome annotations and to provide a resource for functional genomics, Marc Vidal of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an international team of researchers have tackled what they call the "ORFeome," the complete set of protein-encoding open-reading frames (ORFs) in the Caenorhabditis elegans genome (Nat Genet, advance online publication, DOI:10.1038/ng1140, April 7, 2003). Using annotation data, the

Courtesy of Mary Ann Moran  THE MICROBE HUNTER: University of Georgia graduate student Justine Lyons uses new molecular approaches to study the diversity of bacteria and fungi in a coastal salt marsh on Georgia's Sapelo Island. An outbreak of Salmonellosis erupted in Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and Alabama during the winter of 1981. Frustrated epidemiologists could find no common link, until they finally realized what all the victims had in common: marijuana.1 Samples of pot used by some pa

GADGET WATCH | Au Revoir, Ponceau S Courtesy of Pierce Biotechnology Western blotting is a standard facet of gene expression analysis: Separate protein extracts electrophoretically, blot the proteins to a nitrocellulose or nylon membrane, and probe for the presence of a particular protein. Traditionally, verifying the efficiency of protein transfer to the membrane is accomplished by staining with Ponceau S or Coomassie® Blue. Ponceau is a relatively insensitive red dye (250 ng detection

Gadget Watch | Good Vibrations Courtesy of Bel-Art Products Who hasn't experienced this frustration: When measuring out a minute quantity of a precious reagent in the microgram balance, your hand slips, and whoops! You've just dumped--and possibly lost--way more powder than you need. The Quaver® nonmotorized vibrating spatula and its nimbler sibling, the Quaverette®, could make such problems things of the past. Manufactured by Bel-Art Products (www.bel-art.com) of Pequannock, NJ, t

5-Prime | Nonribosomal Peptide Synthesis What is it? As the name suggests, nonribosomal peptide synthesis (NRPS) generates polypeptides sans ribosome. The resultant peptides, generally short oligomers of two to perhaps 48 residues, are not genome-encoded. Where ribosomal translation is limited to the standard complement of 20 L-amino acids, nonribosomal peptides may contain unusual building blocks, including D-amino acids, methylated variants of the standard amino acids, and nonproteinogen