November 2007

Since beginning his career as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft, Frederick Sachs has been a research fellow at NIH's biophysics laboratory, and served as both an NIH physiology reviewer and NSF consultant. His most recent work, as professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Buffalo, pinpointed a protein in tarantula venom as a potential drug candidate to treat atrial fibrillation. In a provocative Opinion, Sachs proffers that funneling more money into the NIH budget ha

How far has open access come in a decade? And where will it go in the next?

Fixing authorship In his column "Me first!" Glenn McGee proposes two changes to fix the system of scientific authorship.1 Drawing simple authorship rules is easy when a paper requires a single field of expertise and can be understood by all authors. However, many papers require that people from different fields come together, and not all authors will understand all the aspects of the paper, even if they devised part of the strategy. How can rules deal with that? Disputes aris

Credit: © THOM GRAVES" /> Credit: © THOM GRAVES FOCUS ON NEUROSCIENCE >> In "A Channel At Large," Kerry Grens explores why the identity of an ion channel in the inner ear has eluded scientists for decades. That's just one of several neuroscience-related pieces in this issue, which you may very well be reading at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego, from November 3-7. Also see "Facelessness, faced," "The singing ear," and "Alzheimer's: Type

Related Articles A Channel at Large The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates Facelessness, faced The singing ear Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes? Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny Manna from hell Birth of a plant Clerkship in Croatia Buzzing for bombs Slideshow: A mysterious kidney disease Unlocking one of many nondescript doors in a long hallway at the Croatian Institute for Brain

Related Articles A Channel at Large The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates The singing ear Baby brain bank Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes? Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny After giving a lecture in Windsor, England last February, neuroscientist Bradley Duchaine was approached by a man who'd been in the audience. He told Duchaine, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscienc

Related Articles A Channel at Large The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates Facelessness, faced Baby brain bank Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes? Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny About 16 years ago, Ralph Harvey, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Tennessee's College of Veterinary Medicine, walked into an examination room where a small, white poodle sat atop an examinat

Related Articles Manna from hell Birth of a plant Clerkship in Croatia Baby brain bank Slideshow: A mysterious kidney disease From ten meters away, the sound of a million honeybees is surprisingly soothing, like treetops whooshing in the breeze. At a daring six meters, the droning becomes ominous and insistent. At two meters away, the humming is so malevolent that the sky seems to darken. "Beautiful music, yes?" says Nikola Kezić, as if there is no doubt. Arranging folding ch

The already-endangered Atelopus zeteki (Panamanian Golden Frog) is now facing extermination from the Bd fungus." />The already-endangered Atelopus zeteki (Panamanian Golden Frog) is now facing extermination from the Bd fungus. While working on her PhD in 1992, Karen Lips went to Las Tablas, Panama, to study the biology of a tree frog, Hyla calypso, an inch-long, spiny, bright-green creature. As she walked through transects in the forest, measuring and sexing frog individuals, here and

Jack Szostak's pioneering work has already been rewarded with a Lasker Award. Now he has one more big item on his to-do list: Creating artificial life.

How did a deadly disease creep into a popular Brazilian beverage?

Credit: BILL CRAMER / WONDERFUL MACHINE INC." /> Credit: BILL CRAMER / WONDERFUL MACHINE INC. In Jennifer Elisseeff's small tissue-culture room at Johns Hopkins University, she points to an eraser-sized pellet of two-layered hydrogel floating in culture medium. She explains how the cells, encapsulated within juxtaposed layers of gel, exchange signals to help them grow. Knowing what those signals are could help her design a hydrogel that would regenerate diseased tissue. As a teen

How to choose a live-cell imaging microscope setup from the maze of available options

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Lynne Coluccio, a cell biologist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Watertown, Mass. Project: Structure and function of the unconventional (nonmuscle) myosin, myo-1c, expressed in the hair cells of the inner ear. Problem: Unless a lab focuses primarily on imaging, few researche

Related Articles Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface Know your needs - "The decision is not wide-field versus confocal," says Watkins. "It's what you're trying to get out of the system." Figuring out the options can easily take a year. Talk to others who have set up similar experiments, and try out as many systems as possible. Or, suggests Maddox, reach out to live-cell microscop

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Anna Barsukova, a graduate student in the lab of Michael Forte, a cell biologist at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Project: Imaging calcium flux in mitochondria of primary neurons in response to cellular stress, a key apoptotic mechanism in neurodegenerative disease.

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Peter Robin Hiesinger, a neurogeneticist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Project: Real-time imaging (seconds to minutes) of synaptic transmission at the neuromuscular junction of the developing fly larva; time-lapse imaging (hours to days) of neuronal outgrowth in cultures of dev

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Sticking to the surface User: Pascal Steiner, a postdoc in the lab of Harvard University neuroscientist Bernardo Sabatini. Project: Imaging changes in spine morphology over time at the neuronal synapse. Problem: Steiner images in 400-µm hippocampal slices in order to capture the 3D branching complexity of

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view User: Warwick Nesbitt, a hematologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Project: Quantifying the adhesion footprint of platelets on proteins in the blood vessel cell wall. Problem: Achieving ultrahigh resolution. Solution: Nesbitt uses total internal reflection fluorescen

Related Articles Going Live Tips for choosing a microscope setup Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface Two-photon microscopy offers two advantages over other live cell imaging techniques: It penetrates up to 1 mm into tissue and it minimizes phototoxicity because the beam excites just a single focal point at a time. In order to excite a fluorophore labeling the tissue, two long-wavelength, low-energy photons must meet nearly simultan