Marty Griffin and his colleagues at Accurate Polymers Ltd. near Chicago say they have invented a better bead. Their 1-micron bead, used for purifying antibodies, has a high binding capacity, and because it is not a bacterial protein, Griffin says users can sidestep problems associated with bacterial product ligands. The inventors have worked for at least three years to refine this tiny item; now they want to take it to market. For most small companies and inventors, the product never makes it t

While a graduate student at Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, Camilynn Brannan struggled to identify the protein product of the H19 gene and obtained evidence that it did not encode a protein at all, but functioned as an RNA. At that time, there were not many other examples in mammals of functional RNAs transcribed by polymerase II, so Brannan assumed she would just have to work harder to find a protein, and that's what she told her adviser, Shirley Tilghma

Federal grant proposal writing may be an art, but for many busy researchers it can quickly turn to a grind: Compiling biographical sketches, doing the project write-up. Figuring the budget. Refiguring the budget. Calculating that budget yet again. Before the application ends up in the National Institutes of Health mailroom, it can undergo more incarnations than psychic Edgar Cayce. Cayuse Inc., a small company based in Portland, Ore., (www.cayuse.com), created a software program called GrantSl