October 2001

Plague has earned a place in history books as the Black Death of medieval Europe, and in novels, from Albert Camus' classic The Plague, to the more recent Year of Wonders.1,2 A different medium for telling the tale of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis is its genome, recently sequenced by researchers at the Sanger Centre, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.3 In addi

To many people, the term seaweeds refers to the yucky brown or green stuff that sticks to your legs at the beach. To others, however, it means big business, and to some researchers, seaweeds equals big science. Marine biologist Thierry Chopin, University of New Brunswick in St. John, Canada, citing United Nations statistics, says that in 1998, 21.7 percent of the 39.4 million metric tons of aquaculture products sold worldwide consisted of seaweeds, totaling $5.9 billion. Moreover, seaweeds accou

Paradigms don't shift easily. But in a recent paper,1 researchers-nearly four years after their initial observation and one year after boarding the journal-submission carousel-are challenging one of modern biology's central tenets. For at least 25 years, biologists have believed that although transcription and translation are coupled in bacteria, they are separated in eukaryotic cells. However, new work from Peter Cook's laboratory at the University of Oxford, UK, which demonstrates translation

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Oct. 16 that it had reauthorized commercial planting of genetically modified corn varieties transformed with genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt corn, as it's known, makes toxic Cry proteins lethal to caterpillars of the European corn borer and other damaging insects.1 The proteins are harmless to humans. As a result of EPA's action, seed companies can now market the products for another seven years, depending on compliance wi

Nearly a year ago, a group of high-profile scientists came together in hopes of sparking widespread reform throughout the science publishing industry.1 Although publishers certainly took notice, these scientists' efforts to establish a so-called Public Library of Science (PLOS) have fallen well short of initial objectives. PLOS founders have now decided to maintain their principles but change their strategy by launching a freely accessible, author fee-funded, peer reviewed online journal. In a

Rest, synthesize, divide: The complex and delicate system controlling the life cycles of a cell has long fascinated scientists, and it may open the door to new cancer therapeutics and detection techniques. For their epochal work on which today's knowledge of cell cycle is built, American Leland H. Hartwell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Britons R. Timothy Hunt and Sir Paul M. Nurse of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, will receive the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine t

With completion of the genome sequence of the tiny mustard plant Arabidopsis imminent, researchers began anticipating the logical next step. Meeting in the fall of 1998 and again in January 2000 under the aegis of the National Science Foundation, they drew up a plan called the 2010 Project, which, if successful, would catalog the functions of all of 'the weed's' 25,000 or so genes. Their goal was ambitious: "to understand every molecular interaction in every cell throughout a plant life cycle."1

The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) in Salisbury Cove, Maine, has received a $3.75 million, five-year National Institutes of Health grant to develop a Comparative Toxicogenomics Database focusing on aquatic species. Slated to go online in 2006, it will be the first database in the world to provide genetic information on aquatic species to the international scientific community (See also, A.J.S. Rayl, "How to create a successful fish tale," The Scientist, 15[16]:1, Aug. 20, 2001

Microfluidics, the science that underlies technologies for manipulating minute volumes of liquids, is the new buzzword in biology-and with good reason. Microfluidics has the potential to revolutionize the way routine molecular biology experiments are carried out. This technology is being used to miniaturize biological separation and assay techniques so that entire experiments can be accomplished within diminutive devices that are about as large as a computer chip. Picoliter-to-nanoliter volumes

The fairly nebulous term mutation detection addresses two fundamentally different questions: "Do any mutations-or, more broadly, polymorphisms or variations-exist in a given gene?" "How frequently does a specific mutation occur in a population?" Getting the answer to each question presents different challenges, and scientists must address each using different technologies. The first question is answered with mutation scanning or screening techniques, the second with mutation scoring, or genot