Frontlines

The National Science Foundation recently provided California State University, Los Angeles, a three-year, $300,000 grant to boost adolescents' interest in science. "Science Technology Engineering Program (STEP) Up for Youth" uses fees earned from companies that import foreign specialists to engage students in year-round science, math, and technological activities. "We hope this will motivate students to pursue careers in these fields," says Sylvia James, director of the NSF elementary, secondary, and informal education division (ESIE). The program aims to "undo the myth that science is difficult, dull, and that it can't be exciting," says Jewel Plummer Cobb, a trustee professor at Cal. State, Fullerton. Other NSF youth science programs include workshops at the Bronx Zoo in New York for 180 low-income high school students and riparian field ecology along Boston's rivers.

The 107 genes that comprise common bakers' yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, have been shown to either protect against, or are sensitive to, ionizing radiation (C.B. Bennett et al., "Genes required for ionizing radiation resistance in yeast," Nature Genetics, 29[4]:426-34, December 2001). Sixty-nine of the genes are similar to those found in people. But what actually makes the genes sensitive or resistant to radiation is not known. "That's going to keep us busy for about 10 years," says one of the authors, Michael Resnick, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. These genes also perform a range of other extraneous functions, explains Resnick, such as membrane metabolism, or protein transport between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. "A lot of them may play a role in allowing proteins that are important in radiation protection to be expressed," he says. Craig Bennett, assistant professor of experimental surgery, Duke University, says "Many of these genes that have homologs in human cells could be as yet unidentified oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes." That knowledge may enhance understanding of cancer and cancer treatment. Adds Resnick, "It gives us a better opportunity to define what are the components of human cells that play a role in resisting a natural environmental agent, which is radiation."

Michael Q. Zhang and two postdocs at the bioinformatics group of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have developed First Exon Finder or FirstEF, a program designed to pick up on the subtleties of untranslated first exons in a gene sequence. Because other annotation programs rely on start codons, says Zhang, they miss the promoter and other regulatory elements in the first exon and intron. The supposed accuracy and specificity in predicting CpG-related first exons is greater than 90% with a lower score for non-CpG-related exons. Zhang believes that added specificity at the elusive 5' end of genes will benefit both those studying regulatory function, and those annotating the genome. "Based on our analysis, we estimate the gene count to be 56,000," says Zhang. The program has already caught the attention of University of California Santa Cruz grad student James Kent, who developed the Human Genome Browser (genome.ucsc.edu). FirstEF's analysis of the human genome will be integrated into the Web site as a separate Cold Spring Harbor track, though at press time, Kent could not give a date for integration.

An Ernst & Young survey reports that British companies captured 39% of the venture capital money invested in European biotechs during the first half of 2001. Despite financial setbacks in other sectors of the continent's economy, the UK companies raised £160 million from January to June 2001, after garnering just £170 million for the 2000 fiscal year. "A large wave of people made money in the biotech boom from companys' IPOs in 2000," says Glenn Crocker, head of biotechnology for Ernst & Young, United Kingdom. "In this time, biotech has become a very attractive space in which to invest." Some companies have benefited from overseas investment, such as Cyclacel in Dundee, which received funding from Singapore, and Manchester-based Renovo Ltd., which boasts investors from the United States. "Essentially, we have a lot of money looking for a home," Crocker says.

In 1866, when Sir John Langdon Down identified the chromosomal syndrome that would bear his name, he noted the characteristic flat face and small nose. Today, researchers at the Harris Birthright Research Centre for Fetal Medicine in London and Ohio State University have supported Down's observation with data. The researchers, using ultrasound, screened 662 pregnant women undergoing amniocentesis; previous findings of thickened skin in the nasal area, called nuchal translucency, indicated elevated risk for trisomy 21 Down syndrome. Of the 59 fetuses that actually had Down, 43 didn't have the nasal bone (73%), compared to only three of the 603 fetuses that lacked the syndrome. Kypros Nicolaides, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Birthright, foresees nasal bone detection as a powerful new adjunct to existing ways that identify high-risk pregnancies. "The most effective method of screening for trisomy 21 is by a combination of maternal age and a scan at 11 to 13 weeks for measurement of nuchal translucency and nasal bone and maternal serum testing at the same time."

Research from the California Institute of Technology, contrary to conventional wisdom, demonstrates that vision is not always the dominant sensory modality. Last year, CalTech researchers reported that someone who is shown a flash of light accompanied by two beeps perceives two flashes instead of one (L. Shams et al., "Illusions. What you see is what you hear," Nature, 408:788, 2000). Now, in NeuroReport, they report that visual processing is not as strictly visual as once believed (L. Shams et al., "Sound alters visual evoked potentials in humans," NeuroReport, 12:3849-52, Dec. 4, 2001). "The study challenges the idea that the different sensory modalities operate independently of each other and [that] only at a higher level the information from sound and sight and touch can come together," says Ladan B. Shams, lead author and postdoctoral researcher. The new study measured brain-emitted electric potentials, from the back of the scalp where early visual areas are located, of individuals shown a single flash paired with two brief beeps. As with the earlier study, the sound created the illusion of two flashes. Electrode measurements showed that the illusion of the second flash invoked activity in the visual area similar to that caused by a physical second flash.