Articles by Jennifer Fisher Wilson

Jacob Halaska, ©Index Stock Imagery Researchers like mice. US government statistics reveal that the whiskered ones show up in 90% of all experiments. Mice come cheap, procreate often, and die fairly quickly. And although evolution separates mouse from human by an estimated 75 to 100 million years, biologically and genetically speaking, they share a lot; as much as 85% of the DNA in mice is the same in humans. The research ground that mice have domineered for a century, however, is reced

 Models of estradiol (left) and genistein. For decades, researchers believed that a single estrogen receptor mediated the effects of estrogens in the body. So imagine their surprise when Jan-Åke Gustafsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced at a 1996 Keystone symposium the discovery of a second estrogen receptor in the rat prostate. The revelation added unexpected complexity to scientists' understanding of estrogen's biological action. Many attendees scurried back to

Image: Courtesy of Michael Tolentino  Signs of Aging The fundus, opposite the pupil, is shown. This patient has wet, age-related macular degeneration, which occurs when new vessels form to improve the blood supply to oxygen-deprived retinal tissue. The new vessels are delicate and break easily, causing bleeding and damage to surrounding tissue. Blood and lipid in the macula are present. In the past few years, the media have written numerous, hopeful stories of how scientists are stifling

Late last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first osteoporosis treatment that stimulates bone formation, instead of slowing bone breakdown as other drugs do. Teriparatide decreased vertebral fractures by 90% while increasing spinal bone mass. This new drug is a portion of human parathyroid hormone (PTH), the primary regulator of calcium and phosphate metabolism in bone. Teriparatide (Forteo) is manufactured by Eli Lilly and Co. and is a clear step forward, though it does no

Courtesy of Paul Bertone, Arno Grbac, Heng Zhu, and Michael Snyder Scientists who add detergents to their cell preps, take heed: You might be consigning the most interesting stuff to the trash bin. Not proteins, surely, or nucleic acids, but lipids. A class of molecules united by their common solubility in organic solvents, lipids are like the poor relations among wealthier biological macromolecules. "Researchers are familiar with nucleic acids, RNA, proteins, and maybe even carbohydrates, b

Graphic: Courtesy of Shin-Ichiro Imai  SILENCE OF THE CHROMATIN: The Sir2 protein requires NAD for its enzymatic activity. It couples NAD breakdown to nicotinamide and ADP-ribose with the removal of acetyl groups from histone and other proteins. The acetyl moiety is transferred to ADP-ribose, which creates the chemical acetyl-ADP ribose. Deacetylated nucleosome are packed up to silenced chromatin structure and involved in silencing gene transcription. This Sir2 enzymatic activity links ene

Image: Courtesy of Koichiro Sakai  DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY: Hypothetical mechanisms of paraneoplastic neurologic syndromes. Cancer cells share the antigens with neurons or muscle cells; the antigens are exposed to the immune system and sensitize T-cells and B-cells. The sensitized cytotoxic T-cells may directly attack the neuronal cells, or the sensitized helper T-cells and B-cells may induce autoantibodies which cause dysfunction in the neurons or the muscle cells. For over 100 years, scie

The discoverer of prions, the pathogens implicated in the fatal, brain-wasting mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), announced recently that a therapy against them would likely be available within the next five to 10 years, but he added that scientists are still mystified by exactly what circumstances cause the pathogens to produce infections in animals and humans. "We thought that the number of cases of the disease would increase two to th

For this article, Jennifer Fisher Wilson interviewed Richard J. Roberts, chief U.S. editor of Nucleic Acids Research; Alex Bateman, group leader of Pfam at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge; and Peer Bork, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's SMART team in Heidelberg, Germany, for SMART. Data from 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. All four Hot Papers were published Jan

The Faculty of 1000 is a Web-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. It provides a continuously updated insider's guide to the most important peer-reviewed papers within a range of research fields, based on the recommendations of a faculty of more than 1,400 leading researchers. Each issue, The Scientist publishes a list of the 10 top-rated papers from a specific subject area, as well as a short review of one or more of the listed papers. We also publish a selection of comm

In the 1940s, the mass production of penicillin led to a sensational reduction in illness and death from bacterial disease. A resulting golden era of bacterial research emerged with new classes of antibiotics, and by 1969, US Surgeon General William H. Stewart told Congress: "The time has come to close the book on infectious disease." As a result, fewer new students specialized in bacterial physiology, and federal funders shifted their focus to more immediately pressing diseases, as did many pha

When linezolid (Zyvox) received federal approval in early 2000, it was the first completely new antibiotic compound to reach the pharmaceutical market in 35 years. The synthetic compound even proved effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) bacteria, for which no other line of defense existed. Its creator, New Jersey-based Pharmacia, sounded confident that few people would become resistant to the drug. It was not to b

Three decades ago, it was widely believed that antibiotics had conquered bacteria. But as antibiotic-resistant bacteria have proliferated, pharmaceutical companies have searched for a broad-spectrum drug that could kill them quickly and safely without falling prey to bacterial resistance (See 'Renewing the Fight Against Bacteria' and 'Retracing Steps to Find New Antibiotics'). Now, in the first supramolecular approach to antibiotic drug design, the answer may be near. Researchers at The Scripps

Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou developed an experimental operation at Rutgers University that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electrodes placed in the brain to reduce Parkinson's disease symptoms. Following surgery, patients walk and move without the usual unsteadiness that accompanies the disease. "The work is the most rewarding science I have done in my entire career," Micheli-Tzanakou says. The researcher also created the first computer-to-brain interface by combining computat

For this article, Jennifer Fisher Wilson interviewed Thanos Halazonetis, molecular biologist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia; Tak Mak, departments of medical biophysics and immunology at University of Toronto; and Carol Prives, department of biological sciences at Columbia University in New York City. Data from 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. N.H. Chehab et al., "Chk2/hCds1 f