My past came back to haunt me today. I was an eager attendee of the 2006 International Symposium: Stem Cell Symposium, which was organized by the Women?s Technology Cluster, a business incubator in San Francisco. I had no idea that salamanders would enter the discussions of differentiation and deals. But, as fate would have it, the amphibious creatures served as prime evidence of the possibilities and potential of regenerative medicine. These are the same animals that my friend in fourth grade,

Atlantic salmon seems an unlikely source of inspiration for a research gadget.

Last month Ron Smock, owner of Drug Detection Services, a forensic and criminalistic testing facility in Albuquerque, NM, posted this auction on eBay

These days RNA interference seems to be everywhere.

Courtesy of Ronald Simon, University of BaselBarely five years ago, Juha Kononen, then at the National Cancer Institute, presented a straightforward way of constructing tissue microarrays (TMAs): a glass slide covered with as many as 1,000 cores of tissue, measuring from 0.6 mm to 2.0 mm in diameter.1 Suddenly, researchers could analyze gene expression and protein levels on hundreds of tissue samples by processing just one slide, instead of the hundreds previously required. As a result, scientis

Researchers use automation to boost crystallography efforts, resulting in more data in less time, from less protein

Courtesy of AfCS-Nature Signaling Gateway (www.signaling-gateway.org)  A WORK IN PROGRESS Complex as it is, this cell signaling map isn't finished. But since every interaction shown is a potential point for therapeutic intervention, understanding the wiring of these messaging systems could deliver new drugs to the clinic. Signal transduction wasn't exactly the first thing that came to mind when my mother told me that she had medullary thyroid cancer. Thoughts of not having my mother aroun

Courtesy of Marisa Dolled-Filhart, Robert L. Camp, and David L. Rimm  CORE TECHNOLOGY: Images of a breast cancer tissue microarray core immunofluorescently stained with (clockwise from top left) a rabbit pan-cytokeratin antibody, an Estrogen Receptor antibody, and DAPI, allowing for differential fluorescent tagging of each. If there's anyone who can appreciate tissue microarrays, it's histology technician Sabina Magedson. Having worked in a pathology laboratory at M.D. Anderson Cancer Ce

Courtesy of Ciphergen Biosystems Wildlife biologist Marissa Irwin had no idea that cells in her body had gone haywire. In response to scrambled protein signaling pathways, certain cells turned cancerous and grew into tumors that took over the 37-year-old woman's ovaries. Though her doctors settled on a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, they could not determine what kind of neoplasia was causing the tumor growth--an important factor in determining the proper treatment. Daniel Chan is one of a growi

Photo: Courtesy of Boston Biochem PURITY CHECK: Boston Biochem CEO Francesco Melandri (right) and research associate Nick Crawford assess the purity of a protein using SDS-PAGE. Researchers expend a lot of energy studying gene and protein expression. But what happens when the proteins are no longer needed? In the late 1980s Alfred L. Goldberg, professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, and Martin C. Rechsteiner, professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, addressed thi

Toxicologists traditionally use animals to test the toxicity of chemicals and other substances. But the brand new field of toxicogenomics, which applies a whole-genome approach to toxicology questions, is changing all that. Still in its infancy, this field is destined to change the way toxicologists think and act, and could even help optimize the drug-development process. "It holds great promise for the future," says Jay Goodman, a Michigan State University toxicologist. "Toxicogenomics is a to