Frontlines Image: Erica P. Johnson But will the tooth fairy expand operations? Pamela Yelick is not an evil scientist; she is not creating rats that eat themselves alive. Rather, she and her group at Boston's Forsyth Institute have grown tooth crowns in rodents' abdomens to demonstrate the feasibility of bioengineering mammalian teeth from dissociated cells (C.S. Young et. al; "Tissue engineering of complex tooth structures on biodegradable polymer scaffolds," Journal of Dental Researc

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Since Aristotle, humans have pondered how body patterns form. Almost invariably, each person has the same skeletomuscular arrangements. Some bodily structures, such as vertebra and ribs, seem to come about by reiteration of a common process. These segments derive from somites, which are serially repeated precursors that in turn develop by sequentially 'budd

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 12 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Psst! Gene Therapy Research Lives COVER STORY | Progress registers experiment by experiment, trial by trial | By Josh P. Roberts Image: Getty Images In 1990, three men--W. French Anderson, R. Michael Blaese, and Kenneth Culver--led a trial in which the genetically corrected adenosine deaminase (ADA) T cells, belonging to a 4-year-old gir

Most people run on an internal 24-hour cycle, synchronized to the light and dark cycles of the outside world. Information about external luminescence is conveyed to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus, which incorporates it into what is known as the circadian rhythm, or biological clock. In cold-blooded vertebrates, deep-brain photoreceptors allow for photoentrainment, the process by which the eyes facilitate setting of the circadian clock. Mammals do not have these receptors;

Not long ago, scientists conducted loss-of-function experiments in mammals mostly by using antisense, dominant negative, or knockout technologies: Bind up the messenger RNA, swamp out the protein, or interrupt the gene, and then examine the phenotype. But the former two are unreliable, and tend to be inefficient even when they do work; the latter is difficult to achieve for both copies of a gene in a somatic cell. With such blunt instruments, researchers have been painstakingly disabling one ge

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 comme