Credit: brainmaps.org" /> Credit: brainmaps.org The paper: C. Padoa-Schioppa & J.A. Assad, "Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex encode economic value," Nature, 441:223-6, 2006. (Cited in 76 papers) The finding: Researchers from Harvard Medical School measured neuronal firing rates in macaques who had been offered different juice rewards. By varying the amounts and types of

Credit: © Alex Maness Photography" /> Credit: © Alex Maness Photography In John Rawls' basement lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, thousands of spotted and striped zebrafish swim in their shoe box-sized tanks. Some of the eggs the fish lay Rawls will make sterile after fertilization - each time creating a new chance to examine the relationship between gut microbes and

Avoiding the pitfalls of medium-throughput SNP detection.

User: Robert McWilliams, Division of Medical Oncology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN Project: Determining whether variations in DNA repair genes affect risk for pancreatic cancer Related Articles Middling Measures Tips for medium-throughput SNP detection Wheat woes Harness Old Faithful Primer price crunch

Credit: Bluemoose / wikimedia.org" /> Credit: Bluemoose / wikimedia.org User: Gina Brown-Guedira, Eastern Regional Small Grains Genotyping Lab, USDA, and North Carolina State University, Raleigh Project: Assaying a large number of species of wheat with a handful of SNPs useful for identifying genes for traits such as

User: Vanessa Hayes, Children's Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research, Sydney Project: SNP discovery and validation in blood samples collected on filter paper and stored for years, looking for prostate cancer markers Related Articles Middling Measures Tips for medium-throughput SNP detection

Credit: Melinda / wikimedia.org" /> Credit: Melinda / wikimedia.org User: Jose Royo, Andalusian Center for Development Biology, Spain Project: Determining the role of genetic variations in the development of human diseases and using this information to develop better drug targets Related Articles Middling Measures Tips for medium-th

Read between the lines when you get price points Often, companies will tell you you're paying $0.10 per sample, but "you can't just go off their numbers. You have to really cost it out," says Jeanette Papp, director of the UCLA Genotyping and Sequencing Core Facility. Some companies will sell enough primer for 4,000 samples even if you don't need it. Anticipate the sample quality and whether you

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53929/tree.swf", width:"510", height:"550", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); The Hybritech Family Tree By Kelly Rae Chi Hybritech was funded by venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a well known firm in Silicon Valley that has gone on to fund Amazon, Google, and hundreds of other information and biotechnology firms. Among Hybritech's b

How one company helped seed San Diego's industry.

Credit: Courtesy of Piero Carninci" /> Credit: Courtesy of Piero Carninci The paper: The FANTOM Consortium and RIKEN, "The transcriptional landscape of the mammalian genome," Science, 309:1559-63, 2005. (Cited in 251 papers) The finding: Techniques such as cap-analysis gene-expression and gene-identification signature technology allowed a group led by Yoshihide Hayashizaki at the RIKEN Institute in Wako, Japan, to look more in-depth at the mouse tran

Credit: © Scimat / Photo Researchers, Inc." /> Credit: © Scimat / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: P.B. Eckburg et al., "Diversity of the human intestinal microbial flora," Science, 308:1635-8, 2005. (Cited in 158 papers) The finding: David Relman from Stanford University and colleagues sequenced more than 13,000 ribosomal RNA genes from microbial populations in the gut tissue and feces of three adult humans. "In some ways, thi