WIKIMEDIA, MATTOSAURUSBy making genetically modified organisms (GMOs)reliant on lab-made amino acids, two groups have come up with a new GMO biocontainment strategy. Their work was published in Nature this week (January 21).
“It really addresses a long-standing problem in biotechnology, by engineering a really compelling solution to engineering biocontainments or biological barriers that limit the spread and survival of organisms in natural environments, and along the way also endow these organisms with new and expanded biological function,” said Farren Isaacs at Yale University, who led one of the studies.
V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINEOxytocin may help improve social deficiency-related symptoms of autism, according to research on a mouse model of the disorders. Scientists who administered doses of oxytocin to mice displaying symptoms of autism spectrum disorders or ramped up the animals’ production of the hormone saw that “it would rescue those social deficits,” said Larry Young, who studies social neuroscience at Emory University and was not involved in the work. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine this week (January 21).
HUMAN PROTEIN ATLASUnlike those that preceded it, which were largely based on mass spectrometry data, the latest comprehensive map of the human proteome was created using immunohistochemistry. Members of the Human Protein Atlas project detailed the results of their years-long initiative to catalog protein expression throughout the body in Science this week (January 22).
“[The authors] have done a great job with putting the results out there in an easy-to-use format,” said ...
