Frontlines | Botulism from Blubber Corbis Botulism, usually associated with eating improperly canned foods, get its name from the Latin botulus for sausage, a source when the illness was first described in Europe in the late 19th century. A recent report chronicles another source and route: consuming raw beached marine mammals (J. Middaugh et al., "Outbreak of botulism type E associated with eating a beached whale - Western Alaska, July 2002," Morbid Mortal Wkly Rep, 52:24-6, Jan. 17, 2003)

Frontlines | RNA Interference Maintained in Stem Cells Short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) offer a new way to silence genes, courtesy of RNA interference (RNAi). A study from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, home of the discovery of the RNAi enzyme dicer, indicates that these RNAs can be more than "off" switches. Different RNA hairpins corresponding to the same gene can squelch expression to different degrees, modulating a phenotype in a controlled way by tagging messenger RNAs for destruction. Gre

Frontlines | Better Rap for Bilirubin Erica P. Johnson The yellow bile pigment bilirubin has a bad reputation. The normal end-product of hemoglobin breakdown, in excess it causes jaundice, lethargy, seizures, and death. Yet, people with only slightly elevated levels are less prone to heart disease. Neuroscientist Solomon Snyder and colleagues at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore discovered why the body makes bilirubin at all, when its immediate precursor, biliverdin, is easily excr

Courtesy of Vasudeva Mahavisno  CANCER CARTOGRAPHY: Metastatic prostate cancer from a tissue array stained for EZH2 protein. The background represents gene expression signatures of prostate cancer as a heat map, which lead to the discovery of EZH2 as a prostate cancer biomarker. As soon as Watson and Crick deduced DNA's structure half a century ago, their thoughts turned to RNA. Arguably the most important molecule in the living world, RNA not only connects gene to protein, but its catal

Frontlines | What Does the Manatee Say to the Aardvark? Ancient Auntie. The aardvark or "earth pig" may be the closest living relative to the ancestral placental mammal, a new chromosomal comparison suggests. Molecular sequence analyses group it with tenrecs, hyraxes, elephant shrews, manatees, elephants, and golden moles as "Afrotheria," the oldest of four groups of placental mammals that originated, according to fossil evidence, on the supercontinent Gondwana 105 million years ago. Terr

Frontlines | Out of Agonists Comes an Antagonist Reprinted with permission from Nature Pseudomonas aeruginosa can devastate the lungs of a person with cystic fibrosis or a suppressed immune system, for these bacteria are more than the sum of their parts. When their numbers reach a critical mass, signaling from accumulated microbial "autoinducers" triggers production of virulence factors and formation of a biofilm, a polysaccharide shield that protects the bacterial colony from an immune re

Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory  IDENTIFYING NEW CANCER GENES: (1) Clinicians biopsy cancerous (left) and normal (right) tissues from patient. (2) DNA microarrays containing thousands of individual human genes are exposed to a mixture of labeled dna samples. (3) Red spots indicate genes amplified in cancer cells, green spots show genes deleted. (4) Both classes of genes become potential targets for new diagnostic or therapeutic anti-cancer strategies. In 1994, discovery of the

Courtesy of Peggy Greb, ARS Photo Library Picture an imperfect hall of mirrors, with gene sequences reflecting wildly: That's the human genome. The duplications that riddle the genome range greatly in size, clustered in some areas yet absent in others, residing in gene jungles as well as within vast expanses of seemingly genetic gibberish. And in their organization lie clues to genome origins. "We've known for some time that duplications are the primary force for genes and genomes to evolve ov

West Nile Virus Triggers Apoptosis; Smelling Good May Cost Too Much; Three Green Mice... Three Green Mice Courtesy of NASA IMMUNOLOGY | West Nile Virus Triggers Apoptosis Even as West Nile virus (WNV) spreads, researchers still know little about its infective choreography. To track the steps, David B. Weiner, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues marked WNV capsid protein with green fluorescent protein (GFP) and trans

As researchers track the signals that lure stem cells along apparent developmental detours, it is beginning to look like the cells' plasticity is a natural response to injury. At first, the stem cells seemed to breach the boundaries set in the early embryo, morphing from mesoderm to endoderm, ectoderm to mesoderm, and variations on that theme. This transdifferentiation was originally thought to be a rarity, but cases have accumulated and a new view is emerging: What if everything can turn int

Online bioethics seminar reviews basics in an increasingly complex research environment.

Image: Courtesy of Elliott Marguiles  PIPS ON PARADE: Researchers used a MultiPipMaker to show the alignments, expressed as percent identity plots, between a human reference sequence and several other species. This is a 20 kb region surrounding exon 2 of the MET gene. Gap-free alignable segments are represented as horizontal lines along the human reference sequence; the line's height represents the identity of that alignment. Aristotle envisioned humanity as the pinnacle of a "Great Chai