October 2004

Last month my parents threw a party to mark their 50th wedding anniversary. After dinner, dad gave a speech recalling their honeymoon, for which they traveled from Scotland to Port Bou, a village on the France-Spain border squeezed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pyrenees. While he was discretely sketchy about certain aspects of the adventure, he vividly described meals as though he'd just eaten them.Food rationing was just ending in the Britain of 1954. After years of compulsory restricti

American scientists seem to have forfeited their chance to convince the government to support research into therapeutic cloning as the source of a new generation of rational therapies. It was not always this way. As a young scientist working at Cold Spring Harbor in the early 1970s, my telephoning Paul Berg at Stanford University concerning his work on recombinant DNA and tumor viruses led to the Asilomar conferences, from which the voluntary moratorium on recombinant DNA work emerged, leading t

LIPID RAFTS INSIDE AND OUT:© 2002 AAASIn the outer leaflet (A), sphingolipids and cholesterol form less fluid microdomains (B) called lipid rafts, which are enriched for GPI-proteins. Microdomains may contain more rigid subdomains (C) enriched for the sphingolipid ganglioside GM1. The membrane inner leaflet contains microdomains (D) with unknown lipid composition enriched for prenylated proteins. In contrast, caveolin and proteins carrying the two saturated fatty acyl chains become concentr

Pyrrolysine, the 22nd amino acid, discovered in 2002, might lay claim to being the 21st following the discovery by Ohio State University researchers that, like the twenty canonical amino acids, it is translated by the genetic code using a natural tRNA synthetase-tRNA pair.1 Pyrrolysine is the first new amino acid discovered since selenocysteine in 1986, but the latter results from modification of serine after attachment to its tRNA.Microbiologist Joseph Krzycki and chemist Michael Chan discovere

Courtesy of Georgia Institute of TechnologyMost patients with insulin-dependent diabetes still control their blood glucose levels with a poke in the finger and a shot in the arm. While that crude but effective procedure is years away from being replaced on a large scale, many are looking to deliver insulin and other drugs in a more foolproof, less invasive manner.Associate professor Andrew Lyon's lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a thin, self-assembling, layered hydrogel f

Two recent reports offer a taste to the little-known underlying immunological mechanisms of celiac disease, a digestive autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten protein, which affects as many as 1 in 100 people in the United States.Working ex vivo, a University of Chicago group found that interleukin-15 overexpression helps convert antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) into rogue lymphokine-activated killers (LAKs) via the CTL receptor NKG2D.1 The LAK cells provoke a more general immune

Professors P. Motta & T. Naguro/Photo ResearchersEach of our cells hangs in a delicate balance between life and death. Which path the cell takes depends on a dense web of signaling pathways that all converge on a single cellular switch, the mitochondrion. Most of the time, pro-life signals keep the mitochondrial membrane intact and encourage the organelle to churn out ATP. But when signals from the outside or accumulated toxins within the cell tip the scales, mitochondria push the cell down

Step into any molecular and cellular biology laboratory anywhere in the world, and chances are you'll see an ultracentrifuge sitting somewhere nearby. Figuring prominently in the purification protocols for everything from DNA and protein to Golgi and mitochondria, these machines rely on the same physical principle that makes children giddy on playground carousels: As the rotor (or carousel) spins, objects are pushed away from its axis of rotation via centrifugal force. In a carousel, that force

Companies typically use their first-time listing on a stock exchange, known as the initial public offering (IPO), as a crucial one-time opportunity to generate cash. However, a run of disappointing biotech market debuts over the summer has caused many biotechnology companies to put their IPOs on hold or cancel them altogether."Only if companies are down-and-dirty desperate to get money and have very few other options are they opting for IPOs," says Steven Burrill, CEO of the life sciences mercha

Courtesy of Mark SewardCombinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening have been the rage in drug discovery since the late 1990s, but plant and animal sources still hold promise. In particular, venoms have proven to be rich areas for exploitation. Drugs derived from snakes, vampire bats, and Gila monsters are all nearing regulatory review and potentially, approval. But in September, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted against approval of AstraZeneca's Exanta, a cobra venom-

© 1995–2004 Missouri Botanical GardenThe drugs of tomorrow may be lurking in the fragile pages of ancient herbal texts. At least that's the hope of an adventurous research project to tap into traditional knowledge lost in the dusty vaults of libraries around the world.Eric Buenz, lead investigator for the Bioprospecting Historic Texts Project at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., believes that ancient herbal texts are an untapped source of ethnobotanical knowledg

Drew EndyCourtesy of Sriram KowitzFor Drew Endy, heading up the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Synthetic Biology Working Group is like being "the lifeguard at the gene pool." Working with prefabricated snippets of DNA pulled off a freezer shelf, Endy and his MIT colleagues are attempting to design and construct new living systems.Their agenda, explains Endy, is twofold: "First, let's see if we can learn more about existing systems by rebuilding them." Next, he'd like to "take natural livi