Have you ever needed a red fluorescent version of a protein, but only green was available?

Fluorescence microscopy is ubiquitous these days.

Eastman Kodak of Rochester, NY, has developed a module for its Image Station 2000MM Multimodal Imaging System that precisely coregisters X-ray images of lab animals with fluorescent, luminescent, or radioisotopic images generated using molecular markers.

© 2004 AAASThese sample data illustrate how phenotypic profiles can be used to tease out novel drug mechanisms.A team of Harvard scientists has found a high-throughput way to tie drugs with the cellular functions they affect.1 Comparing the profiles of uncharacterized compounds with those of well-studied ones, the group also predicted modes of action. The study employed a combination of fluorescent probes, high-throughput microscopy, automated image analysis, and advanced statistics."We hav

Pathology labs worldwide face a shortage of trained histopathologists, says Dennis Chenoweth, corporate vice president of diagnostics at DakoCytomation of Carpinteria, Calif.

RETRO MEETS NOUVEAU:Courtesy of TTP LabTechTTP LabTech's comPOUND and mosquito (inset) systems.With a flash of art deco teal and some vintage engineering decisions, TTP LabTech is making 21st-century science look decidedly retro. Inspired by the pneumatic systems once used to shoot money through tubes in banks, the company's comPOUND storage and retrieval system dispatches chemical vials with a whoosh of air. Its mosquito liquid-handling system, meanwhile, looks a bit like a 35-mm film reel or p

By putting two enzymes on the same shift, San Carlos, Calif.-based NuGEN http://www.nugeninc.com can turn five nanograms of total RNA into enough cDNA for a microarray in just four hours. Key to the technology, termed Ribo-SPIA, are minimal starting material, speed, and linearity, says Anne Kopf-Sill, vice president of product development.Researchers normally must amplify 2–5 micrograms of RNA to perform an array experiment. "With Ribo-SPIA technology, you don't need to acquire a large sam

COLOR MAKES THE MOUSE:Courtesy of NucleisTypical litter of potential chimeras derived from BPES cells injected into C57Bl/6 blastocysts. The "host" blastocysts encode black coat color, while the transplanted embryonic stem cells (ESCs) encode agouti. Occasional mice have black coats and are presumed failures at the blastocyst-engraftment stage. But most offspring have some agouti in their coats. Those that are completely agouti, by multiple criteria, appear to be 100% ESC derived.Instead of wait

BUILDING A BETTER MODEL:Metabolic and regulatory networks may be expanded by coupling high-throughput phenotyping and gene expression data with the predictions of a computational model. (Reprinted with permission, Nature, 429:92–6, 2004).Most people like their predictions to pan out, but Markus Covert is glad when his fail. That's because he has developed a genome-scale mathematical model of the transcriptional interactions that regulate bacterial metabolism. The model's mistakes lead to n