Notable

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. TASTE TRANSDUCTION J.I. Glendinning et al., "A high-throughput screening procedure for identifying mice with aberrant taste and oromotor function," Chemical Senses, 27[5]:461-74, June 2002. "Screening for taste transduction is particularly problematic because of the low throughput--lengthy duration and indirect nature--of the traditional 'two-bottle preference' assay. Glendinning et al. describe a faster and more accurate methodology to assay taste in mice and pave the way for analyzing the large number of transgenic mouse strains that are being generated in labs world-wide." --Stephen Roper, University of Miami School of Medicine, US NEW HUNTINGTON MODEL L.P. de Almeida et al., "Lentiviral-mediated delivery of mutant huntingtin in the striatum of rats induces a selective neuropathology modulated by polyglutamine repeat size, huntingtin expression levels, and protein length," Journal of Neuroscience, 22[9]:3473-83, May 1, 2002. "Focal overexpression of mutant huntingtin in the adult rat striatum produces pathology with striking similarities to Huntington disease, including the massive but specific loss of GABAergic neurons that has not been robustly observed in genetic models in mice. This opens the door to mechanistic studies of the cell-death pathways involved, and provides a novel and accessible system for testing therapeutic strategies." --Christopher E. Henderson, BDM, France ABSOLUTE EXPRESSION A.M. Dudley et al., "Measuring absolute expression with microarrays with a calibrated reference sample and an extended signal intensity range," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99[11]:7554-9, May 28, 2002. "DNA microarray technology has already shown amazing progress in the rapid analysis of large-scale gene expression, but there are some major limitations to the sensitivity and accuracy of the technology, coupled with the extreme difficulty of comparing data with different controls; this paper demonstrates relatively easy solutions to ease these problems. The authors' report improvements on two fronts: one involves cohybridizing the experimental and control RNA samples against a known quantity of labeled, universally complementary oligos; the other involves the use of multiple readings at different detector sensitivities along with a freely available analysis algorithm to increase the dynamic range of the sensor." --Ross Weatherman, Purdue University, US SEQUENCING FLANKS K.V. Myrick, W.M. Gelbart, "Universal Fast Walking for direct and versatile determination of flanking sequence," Gene, 284[1-2]:125-31, Feb. 6, 2002. "A new technique for determining sequence information adjacent to a known region is described. While several methods have already been described for this purpose, this new technique offers the following advantages: simple molecular biology required for high-throughput applications; and the ability to obtain large stretches of adjacent sequence information." --Karin Schmitt, Exelixis, US BIOINFORMATICS D. Greenbaum et al., "Analysis of mRNA expression and protein abundance data: An approach for the comparison of the enrichment of features in the cellular population of proteins and transcripts," Bioinformatics, 18[4]:585-96, April 2002. "The extent to which the pattern of mRNA expression levels and protein abundance levels are correlated within a cell is an important outstanding question in biology, but is difficult to assess due to the emerging nature of both experimental methodologies; this paper presents a formalism for such a comparison. The authors take into account the complex and 'noisy' nature of the data, and discuss some interesting results based on the analysis of existing data for yeast." --Cheryl Arrowsmith, Ontario Cancer Institute, PMH, Canada HOMING IN ON DIABETES L. Hornum et al., "The diabetes-prone BB rat carries a frameshift mutation in Ian4, a positional candidate of Iddm1," Diabetes, 51[6]:1972-9, June 2002. "Is Ian4 a diabetes susceptibility gene in diabetic-prone BB rats? Diabetes and lymphopenia cosegregate in the spontaneous model for type 1 diabetes, the diabetic-prone BB (DP-BB) rat. The authors have positioned the lymphopenic phenotype (Lyp or Iddm1) to a physical segment of 150-290 kb on rat chromosome 4, which includes a cluster encoding immune-associated nucleotide (Ian) genes. Here, they argue that Ian4, which has a frameshift mutation in the allele present in the DP-BB rat, might be responsible for the inability to control apoptosis in the T cells of the DP-BB rat and therefore is a candidate for the Lyp/Iddm1 gene." --Torben Lund, Windeyer Institute of Medical Sciences, UCL, UK REGULATING HIF-1a K.S. Hewitson et al., "Hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) asparagine hydroxylase is identical to factor inhibiting HIF (FIH) and is related to the cupin structural family," Journal of Biological Chemistry, May 31, 2002 (e-pub ahead of print 10.1074/jbc.c200273200) "This paper identifies the FIH-1 protein as a novel iron- and oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenase that hydroxylates a critical asparagine residue in the C-terminal transcriptional activation domain of hypoxia-inducible transcription factor HIF-1a. Hydroxylation of this HIF-1a asparagine abolishes HIF-1a interaction with the coactivator CBP/p300, thereby providing a potential molecular basis for previous findings suggesting that HIF transcriptional activity is directly regulated by cellular redox status." --Ronald Conaway, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, US RNA SILENCING F.E. Vaistij et al., "Spreading of RNA targeting and DNA methylation in RNA silencing requires transcription of the target gene and a putative RNA-dependent RNA polymerase," Plant Cell, 14[4]:857-67, April 2002. "This paper shows clearly that maintenance of RNA silencing in plants is associated with spreading of RNA silencing along a target template. This 'transitive' silencing was shown to require the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, SDE1/SGS2, suggesting that spreading was due to synthesis of complementary RNA along the silencing target." --James Carrington, Oregon State University, US

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