By Kelly Rae Chi Screening Whole How to reel in high-throughput results using worms and fish. In the past few years, improvements in imaging and automation techniques have made it easy for researchers to see hundreds of plates of cells partake in every activity from differentiation to apoptosis. But in living and breathing animals, we’re only just beginning to realize the potential of large-scale screens. “To take a whole animal and

A growth factor injected into adult mice spurs heart muscle cells to proliferate, helping heal heart attack damage

By Kelly Rae Chi Benching Bases How to do heavy computational lifting in genomes and transcriptomes You've unpacked your next-generation sequencing system and popped in some DNA or RNA. Five days later, you've sequenced 50 million tiny strings of nucleotides. Then what? Based on their sequences, you have to align all the fragments, called "reads," with the help of a reference genome—a fully assembled sequence from the same species. In the abse

Dennis Wall: From moss to autism By Kelly Rae Chi © 2009 Leah Fasten In 1996 a few hundred plant scientists gathered in Baton Rouge, La., for an annual phylogenetics meeting. Biology undergraduate Dennis Wall rushed into a lecture hall to meet Brent Mishler, a University of California, Berkeley, integrative biologist, who was considering taking on Wall as a doctoral student. But when Wall, late and disheveled, tried to climb over a row of

Troubleshooting discovery and validation of protein biomarkers for cancer.

Disappearing Before Dawn Gene expression studies are lending support to a new hypothesis for why everyone sleeps: to prune the strength or number of synapses. By Kelly Rae Chi © Kieran Scott t 10 a.m. on a frigid January, the lights automatically flicker on in a rat room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Research Park. Postdoc Erin Hanlon strolls in, still wearing her scarf from the trip to the lab, where she will

How to modify your tools to prevent pain at the bench.

What beginners need to know as they dive into studies on pluripotent cells.

How to put FRET biosensors to work for you when tracking cell signaling.

Credit: Proc Natl Acad Sci, 103:13682-7, 2006 / ® 2006 National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A" /> Credit: Proc Natl Acad Sci, 103:13682-7, 2006 / ® 2006 National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A The paper: M. Ekroos and T. Sjögren, "Structural basis for ligand promiscuity in cytochrome P450 3A4," Proc Natl Acad Sci, 103:13682-7, 2006. (Cited in 78 papers)

Ken Thorpe An academic who swims in political waters By Kelly Rae Chi © Jordan Domont In 1967, when Ken Thorpe was 11 years old, his father took him to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. They stood in an all-white Detroit suburb and watched King deliver an eloquent speech in a racially-charged environment. "It was remarkable in the sense that he put himself out there in a setting like that knowing that he likely was going to get heckled," Thorp

Dama Laxminarayana processes a lupus patient's blood by centrifugation to obtain white blood cells. Credit: © creative Communications / WFUSM" />Dama Laxminarayana processes a lupus patient's blood by centrifugation to obtain white blood cells. Credit: © creative Communications / WFUSM On the third floor of a molecular biology lab in Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, immunologist Dama Laxmina