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The challenge of proteomics is personified in the Greek god, Proteus. The keeper of all knowledge, past, present and future, Proteus would not give up any information easily; even while [...]

Tom Sargent remembers the day a student in his lab forgot to add boiling chips to phenol before firing up the heater on the distillation apparatus, and the panicked shouting [...]

The fairly nebulous term mutation detection addresses two fundamentally different questions: 'Do any mutations--or, more broadly, polymorphisms or variations--exist in a given gene?' 'How frequently does a specific mutation occur [...]

Radio waves might alleviate the zebra mussel problem in the Great Lakes. Since arriving by ballast in an ocean-going vessel in the 1980s, these miniature mussels have spread from the [...]

Bad news for oak forests of the Northwest; sudden oak death was detected in Oregon last month. Though it's unclear how it arrived, it's feared that this killer spread from [...]

New technologies provide insight into chemotaxis Organisms need to sense their environment. By sensing, they can develop, heal wounds, protect against invaders, and create blood vessels. Chemotaxis, or directional sensing, [...]

Mitochondria act as judge and executioner when a cell teeters on the brink of destruction In 1997, to the surprise of many researchers, mitochondria reclaimed the limelight of apoptosis research [...]

New tests for prions shorten the time frame for detection Europeans have destroyed 4.5 million cows since 1996, the height of the epidemic in the United Kingdom, because they were [...]

Multidisciplinary efforts aim at finding the biological basis for a complex disease The rate of autism is rising. The number of reported cases has increased 10-fold in the last few [...]

Predicting natural death is generally impossible, save for those who study Caenorhabditis elegans: They know the precise moment that 131 cells, and only those 131 cells, are programmed to die. [...]

Proteins represent the largest class of biotech drug approvals, and the numbers will continue to rise as work with the human genome sequence proceeds. Figures from 2000 show that 86% [...]

Treating people who have seizure disorders is a little like playing roulette. Place a bet on a drug from column A and hope for a hit. If that drug doesn't [...]

In 1999, X-ray crystallographers did what many considered impossible--they crystallized very large, complicated structures. In that year, Venki Rarnakrishnan and colleagues from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular [...]

Brain size is a lot like shoe size. It doesn't correlate with height, weight or even IQ, though boys tend to have larger brains (and feet) than girls. This lack [...]

Researchers want the right stem cell, under the right conditions, to grow it to the right differentiation stage Diabetics have few practical therapeutic options. Daily insulin injections, while life-saving, are [...]

One wonders what force Dylan Thomas was pondering when he wrote: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.' Chances are the poet wasn't considering [...]

Planning a future, knowing your limitations, following moral rules--these and other uniquely human capacities will be the focus of a research project at California Institute of Technology funded by a [...]

In Sol Spiegelman's classic 'Extracellular Darwinian Experiment,' (1) the developer of nucleic acid hybridization allowed a miniversion of the Qβ genome that replicated with super efficiency to evolve in a [...]

Feeding infants beneficial bacteria can reduce allergic inflammation, according to a Finnish study (P.V. Kirjavainen et al., 'Aberrant composition of gut microbiota of allergic infants: a target of bifidobacterial therapy [...]

The retina can adjust to a remarkably wide range of illumination; from starlight to sunlight, natural light intensity varies more than 11 orders of magnitude. Rods and cones, the cells [...]

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, provides organisms a way to remove unwanted cells, such as during morphogenesis, or to defend against viral infection. Of course, certain molecules exist to prohibit [...]

Osteoblasts and osteoclasts do a delicate dance to keep bone formation and bone resorption, respectively, in balance. Upset this equilibrium, and at one extreme, osteoporosis develops, a common malady that [...]

First came DNA methylases; then, histone deacetylases. Chromatin specialists thought they understood the steps to explain epigenetic regulation of gene expression: DNA gets methylated, recruits histone deacetylases, and together these [...]

Insects rule, says Michael Dickinson, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this year's MacArthur fellowship genius award winners. Insects, he contends, have reigned [...]

Two reports in the December issue of Nature Biotechnology show that the potential of human embryonic stem cells is being realized. (1,2) One group led by S.C. Zheung at the [...]

Currently, antibiotics are the only treatment for anthrax, but they are nonspecific and target the bacterium, not its deadly toxins. This leaves little hope for people who have contracted anthrax's [...]

While efforts to culture beta cells have been successful, getting them to produce therapeutic levels of insulin has not been easy. Recent work from Harvard University suggests that blood could [...]