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GADGET WATCH | Object Inspector in Your Pocket Protector Courtesy of Chris Chou Chris Chou wants you to put your microscope where no microscope has gone before: in your pocket. Chou is the inventor of the microscope pen, a portable, lightweight, but durable microscope that fits easily into a shirt or pants pocket and comes with a convenient pen clip to keep it there. Measuring 0.75 x 5.5 inches and weighing in at a mere two ounces, the microscope pen provides all-glass optics, 100x magnification, and a 1.5-mm field of view. Chou says he wanted to produce an instrument that would allow a researcher to view specimens in the field instead of having to take them back to the lab. "I decided to make something for when you want to look at detail right away," Chou explains. The device's Web site (www.MicroscopePen.com) suggests applications ranging from insect observation and plant study to microcircuitry inspection and gemstone appraisal. To view objects with the pen users can place the clear acrylic tip over the object and look through the eyepiece. Rotating the adjuster ring or changing the angle of the pen adjusts the focus. Increasing the intensity of external light increases visibility of the object. The microscope pen costs $89.99 (US). --June Holloway PATENT WATCH | Thioredoxin in the Kitchen--and in the Field What do bread, beer, and bee stings have in common, other than a picnic? Why, thiol reduction chemistry, of course. A group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, was recently awarded US patent 6,610,334 for a method that uses such chemistry to do everything from baking better bread to inactivating bee and snake toxins. Trypsin inhibitors in soybeans and grains can make them inedible or lead to other undesirable effects. (The products are usually treated by heat, but that treatment doesn't completely eliminate inhibitor activity, is expensive, and destroys other nutritional proteins.) The patent describes a method for expressing thioredoxin protein and NADP-thioredoxin reductase in yeast, which can inactivate the troublesome trypsin inhibitors without the side effects. The protein can be used to reduce flour or seed glutenins or gliadins, leading to "better crumb quality." Lead author Bob Buchanan says, "We have shown that addition of thioredoxin and related components to poor-quality flour improves the baked loaf." It also can be used to reduce other cysteine-containing proteins, such as amylase; to improve animal feed and cereal; and to inactivate venom toxins from snakes, bees, and scorpions. And if that weren't enough, the protein may help brewers make better light beer: It can be used to inactivate proteins that inhibit pullulanase, which is used to break down starches in beer and other products. "Theoretically, thioredoxin could be introduced into any organism," says Buchanan. --Ivan Oransky SOFTWARE WATCH | Toward RNA Structure-Based Searching Sean Eddy, a genetics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, wants to do for RNA structural homologs what BLAST has done for DNA sequence homologs: Make them easier to find. RNAse P RNAs, for instance, possess common structural elements; Eddy's program, called RSEARCH, can find such sequences, but it's not quite ready for primetime. For one thing, it takes as much as 48 hours to run a single search on Eddy's 300-processor cluster. "This is not something you would want to download for your PC." It might take years, he says, before the program is sufficiently optimized to perform searches in seconds or minutes, as BLAST does. For now, RSEARCH can do limited searches for some specific laboratory challenges. Given both an RNA sequence and a mathematical model of that sequence's secondary structure, RSEARCH can compare both to known sequences and structural databases to find homologs and score them according to their statistical significance. Eddy's greatest challenge right now is finding another chaperone for the project. The original author of the software is Robbie Klein, a graduate student who has gone on to do a postdoctoral fellowship at another university. "I try to get graduate students interested in it, but when I explain the project's complexity--that we're trying to do three-, four-, and sometimes five-dimensional searching--they recoil in horror. They want to go back to pipetting." --Sam Jaffe 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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