October 2001

Counting human genes ought to be straightforward. Tracking telltale signs--motifs for promoters, translation start sites, splice sites, CpG islands--gene counters must by now be mopping up, finalizing chromosomal locations of every human gene already known, and predicting whereabouts of all the rest. Insert one human genome sequence, turn the bioinformatics crank, and genes gush out like a slot machine jackpot, right? "No, no, no," says Bo Yuan, of Ohio State University, having a laugh over th

Shaken but not disheartened by events 10 days prior, some of the world's leading biomedical scientists gathered in New York, Sept. 21, to honor scientific achievement at the 2001 Lasker Awards ceremony. As James Fordyce, chairman of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, welcomed attendees, he asked that they view the World Trade Center wreckage "as a reminder of the precious value of life" and that they "not be deterred" from the life-saving mission of research. Echoing these sentiments through

In genetics, certain terms sometimes mask what scientists do not yet understand, such as "junk DNA." Similarly, the chromosomal regions just proximal to the tips--the subtelomeres--have been dubbed "buffers," ill-defined DNA sequences that somehow support the telomeres, which control the cell cycle and cellular aging. A team of researchers from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, the University of California, Irvine, and John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, has used single-copy sequences in

The Rat Genome Sequencing Consortium announced in September that it had reached a major milestone: the three billionth base pair. From February to September 2001, researchers from this public and private collaboration surged forward to collect the first genome's worth of Rat DNA data at an average pace of 15 million bases per day. Using both shotgun sequencing techniques and the clone-by-clone method, the group is surging to cutting the coverage time in half. Richard Gibbs, director of the Baylo

Oxygen--the 'science-in-fiction' play written by chemists Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann--will permeate the Royal Institution as it debuts in London Oct. 27. With the premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theater in California and publication of the play (Wiley-VCH) last Spring, Djerassi, also known as 'Father of The Pill,' and Nobel laureate Hoffmann garnered kudos from an A-list of science 'critics' and respectable notice in theater circles. From Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Murray Gell-M

The theory that a healthy diet and regular exercise can be key factors in staving off cancer surfaces again. The latest support comes from researchers spanning from the United Kingdom, across the Atlantic, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean--researchers at the Imperial College of Medicine and the UK's Institute of Food Research studying colon cancer, and investigators at the University of California at Los Angeles looking into prostate cancer. The UCLA researchers found that a low-fat, high-fib

President Bush's recent decision to allow federal funding of limited research using embryonic stem cells followed weeks of heated debate among scientists, policymakers, medical experts, and patient advocates. At the heart of the controversy are the complicated moral and legal issues surrounding the source of these stem cells, since those that are most valuable to scientists can only be obtained from human embryos. Yet stem cells may offer unprecedented opportunities for developing new therapies

When I was young, my mother's father used to read me a poem by the English poet, Leigh Hunt, entitled "Abou Ben Adhem." The poem narrates the story of Abu Ben Adhem, who wakes up one night "from a deep sleep of peace" to find "An Angel writing in a book of gold." Emboldened by the "exceeding peace" of the setting, he asks the angel what he is writing. The angel tells him that he is making a list of those who love the Lord. Abu asks whether his name is on the list. He's told that it is not. In th

In most labs, refrigerator and freezer storage space are commodities as valuable as oceanfront real estate. Naturally, the death of one of these appliances incites nothing less than a panic, because all of those precious samples have to go someplace cold, and quickly. Now researchers can eliminate hours of worry and frustration with just a few minutes' work, using CloneSaver™ 96 cards from Clifton, N.J.-based Whatman Bioscience. Used as either a primary or backup storage system, these card

ELISAs, a quick and reliable way of quantifying protein concentrations, have a significant drawback in the age of high-throughput experiments: Each ELISA only measures the concentration of a single protein. Although the amount of sample volume required to test for a single analyte is not large, volume can become a limiting factor when assaying several proteins. The Pierce Boston Technology Center offers a way around this problem with its new SearchLight™ Proteome Arrays, which measure the

As genome sequencing becomes a regular occurrence, biology's attention can turn to the next logical step: proteomics. Fundamentally, proteomics is nothing less than the complete catalog of every protein in a given tissue, organ, or organism under a defined growth or disease state. Sometimes this definition is expanded to include protein-protein interactions. The data describe the types and quantities of proteins present and also indicate other proteins with which these molecules are complexed.

In 1940, nearly 30 years after Danish physicist Neils Bohr explained how light energy affects the electrons orbiting atomic nuclei, Coleman Instruments produced an instrument to take advantage of this principle. The device was an attachment to the company's pH meter that could measure absorbance of light in the ultraviolet (UV) region.1 In the 61 years since, absorption spectroscopy has become one of the most widely used analytical techniques in scientific research. Investigators routinely emplo