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Front Page Bibliographies for the Penguin Faithful; Legible Lab Labels; High-Power Proteomic Fractionation SOFTWARE WATCH | Bibliographies for the Penguin Faithful Courtesy of Larry Ewing EndNote, the commercial bibliographic management program, has been a godsend to scientists, provided they work on PCs or Macs. Those who depend on Linux are out of luck--or at least, they were. Now Pybliographer (www.pybliographer.org), from French programmer Frederic Gobry, is trying to fill the void. The software helps researchers who use Linux-based systems to manage bibliographic databases. Pybliographer allows them to search, add, annotate, import, and edit bibliographic records. When it comes time to actually write a paper, material can be automatically transferred from Pybliographer into LyX, the Linux-based document processor. "We're working on Open Office [the leading open-source office-productivity suite] compatibility--that's on our wish list," says Gobry. But with only two other programmers on the project, all of them coding in their spare time, progress is slow. The program was written in the Python programming language as a console application and also features Python-based scripting. A Gnome graphical user interface is available, as is documentation, though the latter is clearly a work in progress. Nevertheless, with more than 200 registered users and many additional, unregistered downloads, Pybliographer is obviously meeting a need. But Gobry does not expect to make his software a true competitor to EndNote anytime soon. "EndNote is a very broad program with a lot of functionalities," he says. "We just wanted something that can meet the basic bibliographic needs of the Linux community." --Sam Jaffe GADGET WATCH | Legible Lab Labels Courtesy of Brady Corporation The task of sample identification can be anything but simple. Manually labeling slides, tubes, and vials is both awkward and time consuming, and let's face it, one person's stellar penmanship is another's chicken scratch. Of course, it won't matter how legible the label was if the ink is smeared by ethanol or chloroform. Milwaukee-based Brady Corp. has a smart, affordable ($249, US) solution to this labeling dilemma: The LAB PAL™ label printer, specifically designed for use in the lab. According to Jim Gross, Brady's laboratory market manager, LAB PAL can speed a technician's efficiency and decrease the errors that sometimes occur when labeling is done by hand. LAB PAL produces neat, legible labels on any of five tape colors that can withstand the rigors of the lab. They are tough enough to weather exposure to boiling water yet sticky enough to cling to sample vials and slides even after exposure to liquid nitrogen and freezing. The device has preprogrammed vial sizes (0.6 ml, 1.5 ml, 2-4 ml) from which to choose, and it includes a built-in date/time stamp and lab-specific symbols. With such a handy tool around, you won't have to stop with test tubes. The LAB PAL works just as well for labeling shelves and equipment. --June Holloway PATENT WATCH | High-Power Proteomic Fractionation Courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office To paraphrase the old saw, there's more than one way to fractionate a protein extract. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, says David Speicher, director of the proteomics lab at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, but all of them share a common problem: an inability to detect more than 2,000 or so proteins, even under optimal conditions. That number is but a fraction of a full proteome, so Speicher and colleagues came up with a way to peer even deeper into the mix. The method (for which the Wistar Institute received US patent 6,638,408) uses solution-based isoelectric focusing to allow researchers to select subsets of the protein extract for subsequent analyses. Protein mixtures to be resolved are driven through a series of buffered chambers that are separated by thin membranes. Once an electric field is applied, each protein migrates until it reaches a chamber whose pH neutralizes the protein's charge. "So if one chamber is bound by a pH 4 membrane, the next has a pH 5 membrane," explains Speicher, "and all the proteins between [pH] 4 and 5 will then be in that chamber." Invitrogen, who licensed the technology, sells a set of membranes for basic separations as part of its ZOOM IEF Fractionator System, and Speicher's team has been making custom membranes. "It is compatible with multiple downstream analysis methods," he says, such as two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. --Ivan Oransky function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

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