Just as the use of RNA interference has mushroomed throughout the world over the last six years, the number of bioinformatics tools to screen for siRNA has blossomed, too. More than a half-dozen proprietary and open-source programs are available, many sponsored by siRNA and reagent vendors.So Jonathan Rux, a bioinformatician at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, was surprised to find that all these resources lacked a critical tool: They didn't account for gene specificity. S

Waring BlenderCourtesy, Sue Lauter, Cold Spring HarborIn 1952, Alfred Hershey of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and his lab technician, Martha Chase, wanted to confirm that DNA was the carrier of genetic information. They tagged the protein coating of bacteriophages with the sulfur isotope 35S and the DNA core with the phosphorus isotope 32P. Using a Waring blender, they agitated the viral particles and bacteria. The blender caused the viruses to shear off the outside of the bacteria: The tagged

© Royal Ontario Museum, Brian Boyle, MPAIn October 2002, a group of archaeologists held a press conference in Washington, DC, to announce a startling discovery. A limestone box had been discovered in Israel with the inscription "James the son of Joseph the brother of Jesus." It was a stunning find: the first physical evidence of Jesus. The news swept through the field of biblical archaeology. The ossuary, a container for the bones of the deceased meant to be kept in a cave, was already on i

South San Francisco-based Exelixis has released nearly 18,000 strains of Drosophila melanogaster to the academic community. The collection is part of a larger assembly of 29,000 strains created by transposon insertion, and it represents, according to an editorial accompanying the release, "what may be the largest public release of scientific material in history."123"We had many long discussions within the company about how best to further develop the technology, and in the end we decided to rele

Richard WebbyCourtesy of St. Jude Children's Research HospitalWhen Richard Webby heard through the grapevine that his employer, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., planned to build a factory on the hospital campus, he didn't express much interest, assuming it was a business decision. "It was a shrug your shoulders kind of reaction," says the virologist who is part of the World Health Organization's network of influenza experts.But when the Asian bird flu erupted in 2003, he

Courtesy of Mary-Claire KingAfter 16 years of exhausting research, data collection and computation, Mary-Claire King's lab determined in 1990 that a mutation on chromosome 17 was a common occurrence among women in families that had clusters of breast cancer. This family tree shows one of the families in the study. Squares are men, circles are women. Blackened circles indicate women with breast cancer. A cross through the symbol means that person died.When the paper was published in 1990,1 King b

You were at Berkeley, the center of activism in the 1960s, during a tumultuous time. Do you recall it with nostalgia or regret?Courtesy of The Seattle TimesMainly pride. I don't indulge in nostalgia about that period because it was a terrible time for our country. It's very American: When you see something wrong, you try to fix it. The single most effective thing we did was on the day after the US invaded Cambodia, we got out our suit jackets and shirtwaist dresses – not clothes that any o

Compiled by Sam JaffeCancer vaccine therapies continue to inch toward approval. Even with the complex regulations controlling biologics and cell based techniques, over 100 such treatments are undergoing clinical trials, with more than a dozen in Phase III trials. The underlying mechanisms vary widely, but they share the goal of boosting the immune system to attack pre-existing tumors. Here are four examples of formulations that have shown some promise.Cytokine Vaccine: A whole-cell vaccine calle

Creating a protein crystal structure diagram from raw X-ray diffraction data is a labor-intensive task that can take weeks to months. A new program called ELVES http://ucxray.berkeley.edu/~jamesh/elves from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California automates the process and can churn out the diagram in only a few hours."When humans deal with a complex system with hundreds of things to keep track of, they make mistakes," says James Holton, the creator of the UNIX-compatible program

The copiousness of the Drosophila Down Syndrome cell adhesion molecule (Dscam), puzzles geneticists. Through alternative splicing, Dscam can produce 38,016 unique protein isoforms. Yet, no one has discerned a reason for such bounty. Andrew Chess and postdoc Guilherme Neves, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, suggest that Dscam variants may serve as identity signatures to help individual neurons discern self from non-self.1In the study, microarray data revealed temporal and spati

As your sales rep for US Lab Robotics Inc., here's an update about our most recent models. We've come a long way since UK researchers built the first science robot. In hindsight, that first model was rather primitive. To quote its designers, it "automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses inconsistent with the data, and then repeats

NASA rovers are media darlings, but European Space Agency satellite will give big picture