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Frontlines | The Lab Is Alive, With the Sound of Music Erica P. Johnson The music may be base-ic, but a team from Ramon y Cajal Hospital (RCH) in Madrid have found the song inside us all. They took each nucleotide from the genome of Candida albicans, plus a few other organisms, and arbitrarily designated a tone from the do-re-mi scale (Thyamine is re, guanine is so, adenine is la; and cytosine is do). The end result: a full musical interpretation of the genome. Inspiration for the project

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Embryonic development doesn't occur by magic; it occurs by predetermined genetic steps leading to production of transcriptional molecules. This process is addressed by two Faculty of 1000-featured papers that deal with unrelated species and cover different manners of viewing gene roles in developmental processes. Nonetheless, the work is related. Kevin Whit

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Science sometimes progresses by persistence and attention to detail. This was the case for the recent discovery that a bacterium and the fruit fly apparently share a strategy for signal release, despite one being a prokaryote and the other a eukaryote.1 The new view suggests that quorum sensing in bacteria and signal transduction in multicellular organisms

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Plants need nitrogen to grow, which they derive from 'fixed'or chemically available nitrogen in the soil. How the nitrogen is extracted happens through a process called biological nitrogen fixation. About half of the world's fixed nitrogen exists because of it; the other half is industrially supplied as fertilizer. But to scientists, the natural fix is wha

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Since Aristotle, humans have pondered how body patterns form. Almost invariably, each person has the same skeletomuscular arrangements. Some bodily structures, such as vertebra and ribs, seem to come about by reiteration of a common process. These segments derive from somites, which are serially repeated precursors that in turn develop by sequentially 'budd

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Microbiology has come a long way since the days of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and his "very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving." The animalcules were, of course, bacteria, and Leeuwenhoek's 17th century observations were among the first written records of microbial life. Now, as exemplified by two recent Faculty of 1000 papers, microbiologists are

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Although controversial fetal stem cells hog the limelight, hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which give rise to the entire adult blood system, quietly facilitate high-dose chemotherapy on a regular basis in hospitals worldwide. But HSCs have not been without intrigue--whence they come and how they arise in early development remains mysterious. Now, two colla

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Viruses are evolutionary wiseguys; they have devised elaborate weapons that allow them to sneak past immune system defenses. But a team at King's College, London, has shown that in the case of HIV-1 infection, some human T cells are not completely vulnerable to an HIV-1 viral attack. Michael Malim and colleagues have found a human gene, CEM15, whose product

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. In Sol Spiegelman's classic "Extracellular Darwinian Experiment,"1 the developer of nucleic acid hybridization allowed a miniversion of the Qß genome that replicated with super efficiency to evolve in a test tube. While in vitro evolution has blossomed in the intervening 35 years, one breakthrough in particular has hastened discovery, exemplified by t

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. It's a dieters' dream: Eat what you want and never gain weight. But shedding pounds is an unwanted health issue for those who have cachexia--uncontrollable weight loss unaffected by eating. Cachexia adds significantly to the morbidity of cancer and chronic infectious diseases such as AIDS. The condition also compromises the health of the elderly, who lose m

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. ACTIVATING PK B/AKT J. Yang et al., "Molecular mechanism for the regulation of protein kinase B/Akt by hydrophobic motif phosphorylation," Molecular Cell, 9:1227-40, 2002. "This contribution is important because it presents the crystal structure of the catalytic domain of Akt/protein kinase B and presents a molecular explanation for why phosphorylation of

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Cells control their responses to the presence or absence of oxygen by an elegant system of checks and balances. Recent structural studies clarify some high-impact findings in hypoxia research, lending insight into the dynamic nature of HIF-1a , the hypoxia-induced transcription factor. This infamous molecule, when unchecked, turns on genes that enhance tumo

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 prefer

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 28 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Form and Function Finally Prove Mitchell's Proton Motive Force Perseverance, perspiration and a creative bent pay off | By Susan Jenkins The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. In 1961, Nobel laureate Peter Mitchell's provocative pairing of

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 29 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next New & Notable Selected articles from faculty member reviews | Compiled by Jeffrey M. Perkel The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. RIBOZYME DESIGN D.H. Burke et al., "Allosteric Hammerhead Ribozyme TRAPs," Biochemistry, 41:6588-94, May 28,