Anyone who's ever made stable cell lines knows that clones can vary wildly in terms of expression levels. Some express the transfected gene at high levels, some express at low levels, and some, for whatever reason, fail to express at all. Individual clones must, therefore, be carefully screened. And, because integration sites are random, direct comparison of multiple clones can be uncertain. In 1999 Invitrogen of Carlsbad, Calif., unveiled its Flp-In™ recombinase-based system as a solut

Image: Courtesy of Aperio Technologies VIRTUAL SLIDE comprising 38,000 x 43,500 pixels, scanned at 108,000 pixels/ inch. Selected views show a thumbnail (top), an intermediate-resolution image (middle), and a small region of the full-resolution virtual slide (bottom). Robert Cardiff has thought a lot about virtual microscopy. As chair of the pathology committee for the National Cancer Institute's Mouse Models of Human Cancer Consortium, Cardiff is charged with creating an image archive o

Illustration: Ned Shaw LIKE MOLECULAR TOY-MAKERS, ribozyme researchers create tools with evolutionary, diagnostic, and therapeutic applications. Nearly 20 years ago, Tom Cech and Sidney Altman discovered that some naturally occurring RNAs could perform enzymatic reactions, earning these researchers the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Scientists have now identified several examples of RNA enzymes, or ribozymes. Most make or break the phosphodiester bonds in nucleic acid backbones, but some

Data derived from the Science Watch/Hot Papers database and the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. S.P. Davies et al., "Specificity and mechanism of action of some commonly used protein kinase inhibitors," Biochemical Journal, 351:95-105, Oct. 1, 2000. (Cited in 191 papers) In signal transduction research, protein kinase inhibitors help scientists tease out the vagaries of complex signa

Photo: Courtesy of Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex THE Q TRAP SYSTEM Last October, long-time mass spectroscopist Gerard Hopfgartner got a new toy. Applied Biosystems (AB) and its partner, MDS Sciex, sent Hopfgartner, professor of pharmaceutical analytical chemistry at the University of Geneva, a prototype instrument that combines the attributes of triple- quadrupole and ion trap mass spectrometers in a novel, hybrid configuration. Hopfgartner uses the instrument for both small-molecule and p

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. TASTE TRANSDUCTION J.I. Glendinning et al., "A high-throughput screening procedure for identifying mice with aberrant taste and oromotor function," Chemical Senses, 27[5]:461-74, June 2002. "Screening for taste transduction is particularly problematic because of the low throughput--lengthy duration and indirect nature--of the traditional 'two-bottle prefer

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 29 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next New & Notable Selected articles from faculty member reviews | Compiled by Jeffrey M. Perkel The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. RIBOZYME DESIGN D.H. Burke et al., "Allosteric Hammerhead Ribozyme TRAPs," Biochemistry, 41:6588-94, May 28,

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 38 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Automating the 'Proteomics Street' Tecan aims to streamline the proteomics workflow | By Jeffrey M. Perkel Swiss company Tecan is marketing the first two instruments in its ProTeam™ product line, intended to help automate "the complete proteomics street," from sample fractionation to mass spectrometry (MS) sample preparation, acco

Z. Mourelatos et al., "miRNPs: A novel class of ribonucleoproteins containing numerous microRNAs," Genes & Development, 16[6]:720-8, March 15, 2002. "A novel ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex in HeLa cells was identified that contains two proteins implicated in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), eIF2C2 (a member of the Argonaute family), and numerous small RNAs ~22 nucleotides in length. The finding that microRNAs (miRNAs) associate with eIF2C2 ties together genetic findings demonstrating that Argona

Northbrook, Ill.-based Motorola Life Sciences has tossed its hat into the microarray ring. The company's CodeLink™ platform includes arrays, reagent kits, tools, and software, but the core technology is a proprietary three-dimensional polyacrylamide-based matrix, which Motorola acquired from SurModics of Eden Prairie, Minn. Unlike Santa Clara, Calif.-based Affymetrix, which synthesizes oligonucleotides directly on its biochips using a photolithographic process, Motorola synthesizes its 30

Data derived from the Science Watch/Hot Papers database and the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. For all that is known about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), some remarkably fundamental questions remain. One of the most notable, perhaps, is just how HIV manages to infect its primary target, CD4+-T cells, when so few of those cells can be found at the virus' typical entry points: the v

The standard modus operandi for modeling human diseases in the mouse: Find an interesting gene, knock it out, and watch what happens. In theory, the approach makes perfect sense, and scientists have obtained countless subtle insights into the complexities of biology because of it. But mice, of course, are not humans, and many investigators have had to hastily rewrite otherwise elegant theories because of mouse data. One reason? Researchers have taken for granted that telomere length matters. But