Courtesy of Chloe Hutton, Functional Imaging Lab  THICK OR THIN? The cerebral cortex thickness metric can be used to study the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer disease, epilepsy, mental retardation, and schizophrenia, and to investigate how brain function is affected in the abnormal regions. According to legend, functional neuroimaging can trace its roots to the stroke of noon on a day in the late 19th century, when Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso observed a sudden increase in

Photo: Denis Crawford of Graphic Science  CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT: Drosophila birchii, the Australian rainforest vinegar fly, was unable to evolve adaptations for a hot, dry environment in laboratory tests. Average global temperatures are expected to rise by 5°C or more over the next century. That's a lot of heat to handle for thousands of plant and wildlife species that already have been affected by a seemingly paltry 0.60°C temperature change over the past century. Eggs hatch and

"I lost concentration and began to think of our scholarly daughter working at Yale on a project called Zinc Fingers scanning a protein with pseudopods each with a trace of zinc that latch on to our DNA and help determine what we become." --From Zinc Fingers, Peter Meinke  "GREEN" FINGERS: Zinc finger- based artificial transcription factors (background) have been applied in plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana (foreground). Reprinted with permission, Curr Opin Plant Biol, 6:163-8, Apri

5-Prime | Phylogenetics: Even the Terminology Evolves From computational biologists to forensic scientists, researchers from a range of disciplines are increasingly relying on phylogenetics--the classification of organisms and DNA sequences based on evolutionary relationships (see Hot Papers | Modern Phylogeneticists Branch Out). But the terminology used to describe this relatedness can be confusing even for evolutionists. Here are five primary definitions. Clade: A monophyletic group of t

Courtesy of John Hart Filamentous arrays of FALS SOD1 Ten years ago, researchers linked familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (FALS) to mutations in SOD1 (superoxide dismutase 1), which encodes a copper-containing superoxide dismutase enzyme known as CuZnSOD. Because this enzyme needs copper and zinc to function, the association between SOD1 and FALS led researchers to wonder if copper has an etiological role in the onset or progression of this fatal neurodegenerative disease, also call

Courtesy of Andrew Syred, Science Photo Library  COGS IN THE DATABASE: Duke University's Mitchell Levesque knocked out flagellar function in Bacillus subtilis, like those shown above, to show that novel COGs [clusters of orthologous groups of proteins] can be identified using a single trait-to-COG approach. For nearly a century, biologists relied on fossil records and morphological comparisons to reveal the evolutionary histories of organisms. But most phylogenetic trees need more than p

© Joseph Sohm, Photo Researchers When Michael Thomashow uprooted two decades ago from sunny southern California for his first faculty position in Pullman, Wash., he had trouble acclimating to the colder weather. That made him wonder how plants survive extreme temperature conditions. "Unlike us, they can't just get up and go inside," he muses. The Washington winters sowed the seeds of his interest in plant stress tolerance, and thus began Thomashow's pioneering work using Arabidopsis thali

Courtesy of Gordon Vrdoljak, UC, Berkeley  Pseudomonas syringae (left) and Pediococcus pentosaceus (right) Over the past year, major English-language newspapers worldwide have printed six stories about microbial genomes, as compared with 485 stories on the Human Genome Project.1 Yet, scientists have sequenced and published nearly 100 complete microbial genomes. Dozens more have been draft-sequenced, providing unpublished data that have gaps but are still usable. The public and press may

NIH begins pilot program to create encyclopedia of functional elements.

Image © Nature  MUTATION AND TRUNCATION: These DNA sequence electropherograms show a patient from "family 7" who is homozygous for a cytosine c insertion, as indicated by the arrow. The mutation encodes a truncated NOD2 protein. (Reprinted with permission from Nature, 411:603-6, 2001.) After years of failed promises that researchers would find genes linked to cancers, heart disease, and other complex human ailments, two independent research teams, using different approaches, localiz

Courtesy of Adrian Arakaki THERE'S GOLD IN THEM THERE COMPLEXES: Digging up protein-protein interactions with MULTIPROSPECTOR. Using a computer instead of a pipette, Jeffrey Skolnick contemplates the subtle forces that bring proteins together. His first computational forays helped decipher the quaternary structure of proteins--the interactions between subunits in molecules such as tropomyosin. Now Skolnick, executive director of the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, Buffalo

The Missyplicity Project is alive and well, even though Missy herself passed away in July, and funding for the effort to clone her has moved to the Sausilito, California-based company Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC). The millionaire founder of the University of Phoenix, John Sperling, announced earlier this month that he was terminating a $3.7 million partnership with Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine, aimed at cloning Sperling's beloved Siberian husky mix, Missy.Though the Texas