September 2006

ARTICLE EXTRA Transplants Made to Order ARTICLE EXTRAS Feature Article: Transplants Made to Order OXYGEN SUPPLY Medium flow (0.1 ml/min) was provided by a multi-channel peristaltic pump (A) and gas exchange was provided by a coil of thin silicone tubing (B). Channeled elastomer scaffolds (C) 5mm in diameter and 2mm thick were seeded with heart cells at physiologic density (~100 million cells/ml) At left see a scanning

FEATURE The Reduction of Seduction © PHOTO ALTO From symmetry to smell to the dance floor groove, how evolution carves our ideas of sexy BY NICK ATKINSON Dorothy Hopcroft got it right. Agreeing to a date at the urging of a meddling friend, she didn't quite know what to make of Frederick Turton. He arrived on a bicycle (her former beau had a car) made at the factory where he worked a tough week with little prospect of promotion, an

RELATED ARTICLE Match 'n' Sniff: The MHC T-Shirt Conundrum © CREASOURCE/CORBIS Fragrance companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars on the assumption that scent is a major factor in attraction. But perfumes mask one's natural odor, and that could be a bad thing when it comes to choosing good genes. Time and again, so-called t-shirt experiments have shown a link between body odor and differences between the major histocompatibility complexes (MHC

FEATURE Transplants Made to Order © THOMAS RÖPKE/CORBIS Tissue engineering tackles its most formidable challenge - mimicking nature. By GORDANA VUNJAK-NOVAKOVIC The possibility that we might engineer replacements for worn out tissues - from the simple slips of cartilage that cushion joints to fully differentiated, functional grafts in a ready-to-use format - is increasingly plausible. The need is obvious. With advances in medi

FEATURE Are We Training Too Many Scientists? A glut of postdocs, too few desired positions, and a faculty invested in the status quo point to a need for change. Who will take responsibility? By BIJAL P. TRIVEDI © JASON VARNEY|VARNEYPHOTO.COM After three years of postdoctoral work at the Mayo Clinic, Crystal Icenhour was ready to embrace the life of an independent researcher in a tenure track position. But after more than a year of job s

FEATURE Eat Your Way to Better DNA RICK CONTRERAS Why what your grandmother ate while pregnant with your mother might affect your children's health, and other findings from the growing field of nutrigenomics. By KATE TRAVIS Jose M. Ordovas has been studying the role of lipoproteins in heart disease for decades. His laboratory and others have tried to tease out how these proteins factor into why some people can eat an unheal

RELATED ARTICLE NuGO: A Vision for Nutrigenomics Collaboration NuGO: A Vision for Nutrigenomics Collaboration Like many other biological sciences, we now recognize nutrition research to be a matter of gene-environment interaction. Due to its complexity, nutrition has traditionally been an observational science; matching physiology with molecular thinking was next to impossible. As a result, animal models were discarded and human studies were limited to avail

RELATED ARTICLE A Genetic Diet By the Numbers ANDREW MEEHAN and RICK CONTRERAS While a complete picture of the relationship between food, genes and complex disease has yet to be worked out, several stats point to the benefits nutrigenomic predictions might have for human health. By KATE TRAVIS ARTICLE EXTRAS Feature Article: Eat Your Way to Better DNA Related Article: NuGO: A Vision for Nutrigenomics Collaboratio

Symphony Capital and others hone a biotech-funding model that may offer all parties an upside with less risk.

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic joined Columbia University's department of biomedical engineering last summer following 12 years as principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On page 35 she writes about the strides science is making toward creating biological "spare parts." The trick to successful tissue engineering, she says, is to give cells conditions mimicking the well-optimized process of embryogenesis. The field is quite promising, but "we are mostly

It?s time to come to grips with how we?re misleading and hurting young aspiring researchers.

A Nasty Mother The reverence for nature that Richard Gallagher1 and Lee Silver2 attribute to many scientists and nonscientists isn?t necessarily related to a view that mother nature is "benevolent," "kind," or "caring." An ecosystem can be both "in harmony" and still be deadly to individuals (even humans) and species. Many of us are very nervous about genetic engineering and other issues within bioethics because we humans just aren?t smart enough to take those functions away from

Credit: © CORBIS" /> Credit: © CORBIS CLONING IN IRAN » Last month, Tehran's Royan Institute announced that it had cloned a sheep. From September 13-15, the institute will host its annual conferences on reproductive biomedicine and stem cell biology. For more information, see www.royaninstitute.org. And for columnist Glenn McGee's take on the current state of cloning ethics, see page 26. CLINICAL TRIALS IN INDIA » In April, McGee wrote about the ethics of clinical trials in In

In 1996, Dieter Gürtler and his colleagues from the Mercedes Technology Center in Sindelfingen, Germany, were looking for a model for a holistically conceived bionic car.

Bigfoot conference attendees Tom Yamarone (left) and Jeffrey Meldrum show off Sasquatch footprint casts. Credit: © 2006 TOM YAMARONE" />Bigfoot conference attendees Tom Yamarone (left) and Jeffrey Meldrum show off Sasquatch footprint casts. Credit: © 2006 TOM YAMARONE In mid-June the city of Pocatello, Idaho, hosted the Bigfoot Rendezvous, a conference that included a film festival, storytelling, live entertainment, an exhibit at the Idaho Museum of Natural History on how people "know

Roger Hegarty isn't a big fan of fart jokes. But over the course of a decade studying livestock methane emissions for the New South Wales state government in Australia, he's found that few people have been able to resist sharing their favorite wind-breaking witticism. "There isn't a fart joke in the world I haven't heard," he says with good-natured weariness. He'd be thrilled not to hear any of them again, particularly considering that 95% of the gas actually issues from front en

Last November, Syd Mandelbaum read news accounts that bones dating from the Nazi era had been found during roadwork in Stuttgart, Germany. "The German government contacted the Israeli police to see if it could help identify the remains, but they could not," recalls Mandelbaum, who soon learned that other mass graves from the same period had just been uncovered in Poland and elsewhere in Germany in development projects. With no way to identify remains, the governments didn't know

The scientific manuscript as we know it has outlived its usefulness. Here's how to move forward.

Scientists must learn lessons from Dr. Death to prevent a war over tissue engineering.

Should we repatriate wild-caught animals? And are some animals more equal than others?

Why should junior investigators get all the glory? Postdocs do most of the work.

Choosing the right chemical warheads for your proteomic problems.

Ajit Varki came to the United States to hear 1970's superbands. He stayed to do super glycobiology research.

Filling in evolutionary blanks is just the first feat for the rat and chicken genomes.

Double-stranded RNA is a warning flag to the cell, indicating the presence of a virus. In 2004, Takashi Fujita and colleagues at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science identified an RNA-helicase, retinoic acid inducible gene I (RIG-I), as linking dsRNA and the interferon response.1 In the same year, Richard Randall at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and his group revealed that the V protein of paramyxoviruses short-circuits the interferon response by binding mda-5, a

Credit: COURTESY OF LEEMOR JOSHUA-TOR" /> Credit: COURTESY OF LEEMOR JOSHUA-TOR Greg Hannon's group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was one of many labs scrambling to identify Slicer, the enzyme doing the cutting in RNA-mediated interference. Using biochemical mutagenesis, in vivo knockouts, and enzymatic assays, they had all but pegged Argonaute2. But, says Hannon, "We were stuck ? We could go right up to the edge of saying it was Argonaute without actually saying it." Just bef

Credit: © STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC" /> Credit: © STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC It?s a constant nagging problem, how cancers loaded with mutant proteins escape immune response. In 2004, Weiping Zou, now at the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues showed that human ovarian tumors can recruit regulatory T cells to suppress other T cells.1 They do this by generating large amounts of the chemokine CCL22. Their findings poi

K. Okada et al., "The muscle protein Dok-7 is essential for neuromuscular synaptogenesis," Science, 312:1802-5, Jun 23, 2006. This study, Dok-7, a member of a family of target docking proteins of tyrosine kinases, is shown to be a necessary player in enhancing the activation of muscle-specific kinase (MuSK) and in the development of the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). H. Benjamin PengHong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Replication factories in action

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Trey Ideker: Navigating Deep Waters

http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/24575/1.html Click to view enlarged diagram _blank Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN" />http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/24575/1.html Click to view enlarged diagram _blank Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN Sporting greater mass accuracy than other mass spectrometers, Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR) mass spectrometry instruments have the ability to resolve and sequence intact

What Supreme Court decisions say about threats to the progress of personalized medicine.

What Wyeth learned about working with the US and European regulatory agencies to mine their pharmacogenomic data.

No company is too small or too successful for a mentoring program to enhance productivity, leadership development, and employee retention.

Making marriage work at the job can be challenging for couples as well as colleagues.

The Sbarro family brought their pizza-making know-how to the United States, set up shop, and grew their fast food franchise nationally and then throughout the world. The Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO), initially funded by the Sbarro family, seems to be emulating this model, only with scientific research. Antonio Giordano, director of the Center of Biotechnology at Temple University as well as the SHRO-funded Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine (IC

If you?re looking to welcome postdocs into a company or lab, a copy of the sixth edition of How to Write And Publish A Scientific Paper (Greewood Press, 2006) is a good place to start. It acknowledges two ongoing and mutually supporting trends in science -broadening internationalism and digitizing of publishing - while delivering the basics to give a leg up for getting a paper published. It may even help new recruits become better scientists. "Writing is not really separate from the p

In 2002, Sebastian Velez, now a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, won an award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) that enabled him to attend a conference where he met "the big names in evolution" such as Stephen Jay Gould and Francisco Ayala. "The AIBS award is what sparked my career," says Velez. The AIBS is again offering grants of $1,000 to undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minorities to present their work

Stanford Moore and William Stein pictured at the Moore-Stein-Spackman analyzer, 1965. Credit: COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION" />Stanford Moore and William Stein pictured at the Moore-Stein-Spackman analyzer, 1965. Credit: COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION Frederick Sanger presented the first complete amino acid sequence of a protein (insulin) after 12 years of painstaking biochemistry involving partial hydrolysis and proteolytic cleavage. Needless to say, the process co