READY WHEN YOU ARECourtesy of The Automation PartnershipAutomated tissue culture systems, like the SelecT automated mammalian cell culture system shown here, provide a level of plate-to-plate uniformity that can be difficult to achieve manually. And because the systems work 24/7, they can have assay-ready plates available early on a Monday morning.Much has been written of how robots have been used to streamline drug development efforts. Robots never vary their routines, never tire, and never mak

Exon-junction proteins aid in downstream mRNA processing

Courtesy of Adelheid Cerwenka and Lewis Lanier © 2003 Blackwell Publishing  DIFFERENT MAMMALS, SAME ESCAPE ACT: Human and murine cytomegalovirus have developed strategies to escape from NK-cell attack. HMCV (a) produces UL16, which can sequester some, but not all, NKG2D-ligands inside the infected cell. MCMV (b) produces the protein gp40, capable of sequestering RAE-1 molecules, but not H60. In mice, NKG2D exists in two alternatively spliced isoforms capable of binding different adapt

Dissecting the mechanisms of cancer has revealed an ever-increasing number of interconnecting pathways that leaves even those in the field dizzy with the effort to keep up. In theory, it's simple. In an ideal world, cell division, survival, and death are in sync, promoting homeostasis with neither unregulated growth nor inappropriate cell loss. However, the real cellular world is laden with oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes whose products interact in overlapping pathways that, when dysfunct

Reprinted with permission from AAAS  COLORFUL NOISE: Bacterial cells simultaneously expressing two different fluorescent proteins (red and green) from identical promoters. Because of stochasticity or noise in the process of gene expression, even two nearly identical genes often produce unequal amounts of protein. Listen. Gene expression tends to be noisy. As beautifully regulated as it sometimes seems, the path from gene to message to protein picks up interference; a nagging variability

Courtesy of Linda B. Schultz CHECK POINT: The 53Bp1-dependent checkpoint pathway. DNA double-strand breaks are caused by irradiation and other geotoxic events. The ATM [ataxia-telangiectasia mutated] molecule phosphorylates H2AX at or near the break, an event required for 53Bp1 phosphorylation and localization into nuclear foci. Nearly 15 years ago, Saccharomyces cerevisiae researchers at the University of Washington discovered the function of Rad9, the first DNA damage-checkpoint protei