March 2002

Efforts to keep Russian scientists fully employed, thus away from countries seeking their expertise in making weapons of mass destruction, seem to be bearing fruit, according to Victor Alessi, president and CEO of the Arlington, Va.-based US Industry Coalition (USIC). Of 120 scientific projects in development, 27 are biology related. One such effort is the development of a high-speed needleless injector. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the Russian design, and the injector should

Roger Kornberg, one of Arthur's boys, has a Sydney Brenner story. We all do, but his is more telling than most.

It may be humbling to think that humans have much in common with pufferfish, but at the genome level, the two are practically kissing cousins. "In terms of gene complement, we are at least 90% similar—probably higher. There are big differences in gene expression levels and alternate transcripts, but if you're talking about diversity, number and types of proteins, then it's pretty difficult to tell us apart," says Greg Elgar, group leader of the Fugu genome project at the Medical Research C

One more genomewide linkage map, this for a fish called the three-spined stickleback, was announced late last year to not much fanfare.1 But rather than just another stride in the march of genomics, the accomplishment heralded a new way to approach a question that has stumped evolutionary biologists for decades: What is the architecture of genetic change? The model organisms for which linkage maps have been created are often bred in the laboratory to express certain phenotypes, and they can reve

For the US government's fiscal year 2003, which begins Oct. 1 this year, President George W. Bush has requested a budget of $27.3 billion for the National Institutes of Health, a 15.7% increase of $3.7 billion, the largest single-year boost in history. With a supportive Congress, this will complete the goal of doubling the NIH budget over the five-year period beginning in 1998. About $1.5 billion, or 40%, of next year's increase is focused on bioterrorism-related research and infrastructure, bri

The US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the repository for protein and gene sequences at the National Library of Medicine, now offers links to Internet sites for users interested in more than just nucleotides, amino acids, and protein structure. The system, called LinkOut, expands the biological relevance of NCBI's molecular information by allowing scientists to tap into ancillary subjects such as taxonomy, medicinal applications, and crop cultivation. It also pulls in off-s

Researchers have practically finished sequencing the most deadly form of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. The project, started in 1996, will publish on its current standing late this summer, says Malcolm Gardner, associate investigator, parasite genomics group, at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Md. "I would say we have over 99% of the genome in the database," says Gardner. He made his comments at the annual meeting in February of the American Association for

The discoverer of prions, the pathogens implicated in the fatal, brain-wasting mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), announced recently that a therapy against them would likely be available within the next five to 10 years, but he added that scientists are still mystified by exactly what circumstances cause the pathogens to produce infections in animals and humans. "We thought that the number of cases of the disease would increase two to th

A few years ago, at a meeting at Dana Point in Southern California, I mistook the number of the room in which our breakfast was to be served and found myself in a room full of strangers. 

In one of my pathology lab courses for second-year medical students, we were reviewing the gross and microscopic findings from the autopsy of a patient who had died following acute pulmonary embolism. As I was going through the features that help one distinguish an ante-mortem thrombus vs. a postmortem clot, one of my more outspoken students said sardonically, "This will help me take better care of my patients!" That comment raised, at least in my mind, a question that I've been wrestling with

In light of the recent discussion of the disregard syndrome,1 I would like to add something to your Jan. 7 cover story on SNPs.2 The fact that most nucleotide substitutions are synonymous, and the idea that the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitutions can indicate adaptive change, was described at length by Motoo Kimura in the1970s.3,4 The neutral theory of molecular evolution fundamentally affected subsequent evolutionary thought, even though it met some resistance at first. Technolog

Regarding the funding of research in Canada,1 new money has been injected in a big way, by Canadian standards, with the creation of Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It started in 2000 with a budget inherited from its predecessor organization (the Medical Research Council) of $275 million. CIHR's research budget as of April 1, 2002 will be double that amount—$562 million. Today, CIHR is funding 32% more operating grants (with an average increase in value of 26%), 33% more training aw

Science has entered a new era in which molecules are being used as building blocks, moving parts, and even as electronic components. Biomolecules offer great potential as component parts because nature has already done much of the work; their very shapes and chemical makeup encode a variety of exploitable functions, including binding, catalysis, pumping, and self-assembly.2 A case in point: Science magazine hailed the first molecular-scale circuits as 2001's "Breakthrough of the Year."1 Researc

Before waxing nostalgic about the "good old days," remember: They weren't always good. Take, for example, the task of DNA sequencing. Years ago, sequencing was a laborious day-long affair of performing reactions, pouring and running gels, and scrutinizing autoradiograms. But the process has evolved into one in which scientists simply ship off a few micrograms of sample to the local core facility and wait for the data to roll in. This outsourcing of labor is possible thanks to the emergence and

Until recently, scientists were largely limited in their choice of mRNA sources. For decades it was possible to isolate mRNA from eukaryotic samples, such as animal and plant cells, but it was virtually impossible to isolate bacterial mRNA. That's because bacterial transcripts lack the poly-(A) tails found on eukaryotic messages, upon which oligo-(dT) selection, the traditional eukaryotic purification technique, is based. But now researchers studying bacterial RNA have a new option. Austin, Tex

Founded in July 2001, Adaptive Screening Ltd. (ASL) of Cambridge, UK, is developing several miniaturized drug-profiling platforms. "Advances in high-throughput technologies coupled with the 'genomics explosion' have transferred the bottlenecks in drug discovery from compound synthesis and target identification to hit-to-lead profiling and target validation," comments Tony Cass, professor of chemical biology at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, and one of ASL's c