The Scientist articles from April 2006

The Scientist archives from April 2006

Concepts that click: what do natural disasters and cancer have in common? Ecology.
April 1, 2006... TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT THE COVER. ISN'T THE SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE of the St. Louis Great Flood of 1993 (left panel) and a stained section of a breast cancer biopsy (right panel) remarkable? More spectacular still are the deep concepts that...

Errata.(Mail)(Correction notice)
April 1, 2006... * In the February feature "Battling Bad Behavior," (20[2]:51-57) the author listing should have placed Jonathan Dushoff, from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, first. See www....

Vitamin D fight?
April 1, 2006... On April 8th, at the 13th Workshop on Vitamin D in Victoria, British Columbia, Barbara Gilchrest, who gained notoriety for asking a colleague at Boston University to resign after he wrote a book that championed sunlight for the prevention of...

Ecological restoration.(THE AGENDA)
April 1, 2006... If the issues raised on page 38 of this issue intrigue you, a conference this month might also. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which uses "vast quantities of global biodiversity data" to promote "technological and...

Biohazards.(THE AGENDA)
April 1, 2006... Supporters of convicted plague researcher Thomas Butler take note: From April 24 to 26, the 2nd Annual Transportation of Biologicals and Biotechnology Products Conference will take place in Philadelphia. Speakers will include regulatory...

May the best win.
April 1, 2006... The CoEPrA (Comparative Evaluation of Prediction Algorithms) competition--whose goal is "to advance the algorithms and software for modeling chemical, biological, and medical data"--begins April 17. Submissions are due on May 17, and winners...

Progeria effort pays off.(Notebook)
April 1, 2006... Leslie Gordon's son Sam was 22 months old when he was diagnosed with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome, a devastating disease in which children age rapidly and usually die between their 7th and 20th birthdays. Gordon, an MD/PhD, and her MD...

Edit at your own risk.(editors of medical journals)
April 1, 2006... The list of fired medical journal editors became longer in February when the two top editors at the Canadian Medical Association Journal were fired after a dispute with the publisher over an article about emergency contraception. The deposed...

Hot bacteria near Antarctica.(thermophilic bacteria, Mount Erebus)
April 1, 2006... Twenty-five years ago, New Zealand researchers Roy Daniel and Hugh Morgan made an arduous six-week expedition across sea, ice, and snow in search of thermophilic bacteria on the volcanic slopes of Mount Erebus, the world's most southerly...

The New Orleans mold project.(NOTEBOOK)
April 1, 2006... With its tropical climate and persistent moisture, New Orleans has long been a hotbed of fungal disease and research. But when hurricane Katrina blew through, the town quite literally became one giant mycology laboratory. "We're the mold...

Mountain lion scientist for hire.(Vicki Long)
April 1, 2006... When Vicki Long visited California's Western Riverside County Regional Conservation Authority to find out what it was doing to protect the mountain lion, her favorite cat, from land development, she decided the answer was "not enough." And...

Save our Data! Here's how to prevent critical biological data repositories from disappearing into the ether.(WHITE PAPER)
April 1, 2006... The public research sector has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to generate large-scale biological data sets, most notably in the field of genomics. These large data sets include genome sequences, gene expression array...

Salt in the wound: will India rise up against the oppression of foreign clinical trials?(COLUMN)
April 1, 2006... IN MARCH 1930, MOHANDAS GANDHI SET OUT FROM HIS ASHRAM IN western India on a 387-km trek to the sea. Twenty-five days later the tens of thousands who joined that march watched as he stooped, raised a handful of salty mud, and declared the end...

The ecology of tumors: by perturbing the microenvironment, wounds and infection may be key to tumor development.
April 1, 2006... No tumor is an island. Chemical and physical forces exerted by the diverse cellular populations that surround a tumor--its so-called microenvironment--shape development and progression. Manipulating these 'ecological' factors is increasingly...

Leukemia and cancer stem cells.
April 1, 2006... Cancers and normal tissue stem cells have much in common: Both have self-renewal capacity, and both develop into differentiated progeny. But do true cancer stem cells exist? We believe that they do and that this realization will have a major...

Stem cells for brain cancer.
April 1, 2006... Neural stem cell biology took off in 1992 when Brent Reynolds and Samuel Weiss, working at the University of Calgary, discovered that culturing mammalian brain cells in serum-free conditions (in EGF and bFGF), yielded clonally derived...

What price ecological restoration? In putting a price tag on endangered species and degraded ecosystems, ecologists and economists have joined forces to formulate a new rationale for environmental issues: restoring natural capital.
April 1, 2006... Ecological restoration is expensive. The United States government is slated to spend almost $8 billion restoring parts of the Florida Everglades as wetlands between 2000 and 2030. The Army Corps of Engineers had a plan to spend $14 billion to...

Working for Water in South Africa.(water resources restoration program)
April 1, 2006... The sides of the Baviaanskloof ("Baboon Canyon") in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province range from very steep to vertical. Halfway up a 45-degree slope, under the supervision of spirited 19-year-old Abbey-gail Lukas, 10 men and women are...

How much does it cost to restore a species?(RESTORING NATURAL CAPITAL)
April 1, 2006... (1) Pinon & Juniper Control Where: Imus Ranch, New Mexico Cost: $17 per acre over 3,000 acres Benefits: improved cattle-grazing; increased biodiversity; carbon sequestration; non-profit retreat for terminally ill kids; erosion...

Seeing is believing: graphical presentation strives to make sense of exploding quantities of data.
April 1, 2006... The amount of information life scientists have at their fingertips has mushroomed and continues to grow. In a bid to better access and manipulate this flood of information rather than suffocate on its abundance, researchers are turning to...

Delivering diverse data to multiple audiences: the PharmGKB model.(www.pharmgkb.org)
April 1, 2006... The Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge-base (PharmGKB, www.pharmgkb.org) is charged with catalyzing research for understanding how genetic variation relates to the variation in drug response. The PharmGKB has a mission of...

Best places to work 2006: industry: what makes a company a great place to work? In our fourth annual survey, industry scientists share their insights.
April 1, 2006... Brian Hopkins. a PhD research scientist and project leader at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, joined the Cambridge, Mass., company in May 2002 partly because he liked its DOS (diversity-oriented synthesis) chemistry platform. Working with a leader...

Google your brain: here's what a search engine for your cerebral cortex might look Like.(Column)
April 1, 2006... ONCE UPON A LONG TIME AGO, THERE WAS A B-MOVIE CALLED I'll Never Forget What's Ks Name. starring Oliver Reed and an aging Orson Welles, and notable for the first use in a movie of a common four-letter word (once). But I didn't remember those...

A phosphorylation pioneer: Tony Hunter discovered tyrosine kinases because he was lazy--then the fun began.(PROFILE)
April 1, 2006... To hear Tony Hunter tell the story, his discovery of tyrosine phosphorylation was nothing more than a happy accident. It was 1979, and researchers had known for decades that protein kinases were involved in regulating cell growth,...

A Target for Iressa: The fall and rise (and fall) of a pharmacogenetics poster child.(HOT PAPERS)
April 1, 2006... A Target for Iressa The fall and rise (and fall) of a pharmacogenetics poster child It emerged a seductive idea: Bridging the gap between genetics and pharmacology could allow clinicians to hit cancer cells where it hurts them most. In...

Mechanisms of the cell's sentinel.(THE LITERATURE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Models don't always have to be correct to be helpful. In 2004, Paul Talalay and his team at Johns Hopkins University published evidence that the sensory protein Keap1 dissociates from the transcription factor Nrf2, allowing Nrf2 to induce...

MicroRNAs assume a developmental role.(THE LITERATURE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... With all the hubbub surrounding microRNAs in plants and invertebrates after their discovery, it was only a matter of time before a functional role was found in mammals. In 2004, graduate student Soraya Yekta, and Whitehead Institute for...

A lymphocyte makes its exit.(THE LITERATURE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... While much research focuses on T and B cells entering lymphoid organs, Jason Cyster says he's more curious about how they get out. He and colleagues at the University of California San Francisco found a clue to lymphocyte escape, both from...

Membrane fusion model de-fused.(THE LITERATURE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... According to a popular model, membrane fusion occurs when soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptor (SNARE) proteins on one membrane form a complex with SNARE proteins on another. Barry Lentz of the University...

A Stat5 flashback.(THE LITERATURE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Stat5a and b have given immunologists mixed messages. Nearly a decade of work pointed to a central role for these transcription factors in T- and B-cell development as well as development of some leukemias, but an N-terminal deletion knockout...

Papers to watch.(THE LITERATURE)
April 1, 2006... M.N. Alder et al., "Diversity and function of adaptive immune receptors in a jawless vertebrate," Science, 310:1970-3, Dec. 23, 2005. A computational analysis indicates that agnathans [jawless fishes] have the potential to generate from...

Enza Maria Valente: pursuing Parkinson disease.(SCIENTIST TO WATCH)
April 1, 2006... As a medical student at Catholic University in Rome, Enza Maria Valente remembers helping her genetics professor, a priest in his sixties, as he struggled to calculate probabilities for passing on a genetic disorder. "I would just pick up the...

In search of Microarray standards: an industry/academia/government coalition puts microarray reproducibility to the test.(Microarray Quality Control)
April 1, 2006... THERE'S NO DENYING THE POPULARITY OF DNA MICROARRAYS: 1.8 BILLION data points in the Stanford Microarray Database don't lie. But a lack of standards and quality control metrics for everything from RNA preparation to probe design to data...

How to detect apoptosis: there are many ways to observe programmed cell death; here are six of the most common ones.(LAB TOOLS)
April 1, 2006... Apoptotic cells undergo an ordered series of molecular and morphologic changes, including caspase activation, chromatin condensation and destruction, destruction of the nuclear envelope, and membrane "blebbing." The classic and still...

Quantitative molecular microscopy.(HOW IT WORKS)
April 1, 2006... Traditional histopathology analysis has two basic problems. First, it isn't granular enough: Pathologists typically grade overall marker-staining intensity using a four-point scale. The other problem is that these measurements don't account...

A dangerous import: are ethical objections to patents headed for the US?(Column)
April 1, 2006... IN 1999, A PATENT WAS ISSUED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (EPO Patent No. 0695351) for a method of isolating and/or enriching and/or collectively propagating stem cells. As issued by the European Patent Office, the patent covered all stem...

A genomics payoff? Is diagnostics the best bet for companies such as Celera that once put its money on drug development?(BIOBUSINESS)
April 1, 2006... At the beginning of the year, the Applera Corporation announced that it was melding its molecular diagnostic business, Celera Diagnostics, with its drug development company, the Rockville, Md.-based genomic pioneer, Celera Genomics. This move...

Keeping stem cell guidelines current.(THE ROUND UP)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The National Academy of Sciences is organizing a new committee to periodically update voluntary guidelines it issued last year (http://nap. edu/catalog/l1278.html?onpi_ newsdoc02162006) on human embryonic stem cell research. A call by several...

Biomarker rigor.(THE ROUND UP)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... A new collaborative between the US Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will bring scientific rigor and validation to biomarker research, say the agencies. The Oncology...

New York researchers rally for state stem cell funds.(THE ROUND UP)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... New York State researchers would like to jump on the bandwagon for state-supported embyonic stem cell research. The heads of 17 New York universities and institutions with substantial biomedical research programs released a white paper...

The checkup: use references to learn about candidates and not just to confirm their claims.(Careers)
April 1, 2006... ONCE YOU HAVE PUT A JOB CANDIDATE THROUGH A FIRST OR SECOND interview and you have a strong indication that he or she could be a good choice for the job, it is time to begin checking references. It is important to understand that referencing...

Rise of the Bio-librarian: the field of biocuration expands as the data grows.(Careers)
April 1, 2006... Once the part-time, poorly paid province of postdocs and graduate students, biocuration has become a full-time, salaried career, driven by the explosive growth of biological data in recent years. More genomes are being sequenced, cDNA and EST...

Scientific sisterhood: Q&A with author Ellen Daniell.(Interview)
April 1, 2006... On every other Thursday evening, Ellen Daniell and six San Francisco Bay Area scientists come together to talk about managing their careers. In addition to all being successful, they are all women. In 1977, researchers from the University of...

The science of mentoring.
April 1, 2006... Mentoring skills aren't as readily taught as cell culture or microarray analysis, but on the receiving end, such skills can make or break a career. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a way to address what they call...

2006 life science industry awards: our fourth annual event celebrates excellence in life science product development and services.
April 1, 2006... It has been said that stand on the shoulders of giants. Generally that refers to researchers intellectual forebears, but it also is true of the life science industry--technology giants that provide the scientific community with the tools,...

Immunoassays for consistently reliable results.(Guide)
April 1, 2006... For over 20 years, scientists at Oxford Biomedical Research have been developing and manufacturing high quality biological reagents, antibodies, assay kits and services for colleagues that produce "Consistently Reliable Results". We...

DNA gel extraction, Taq, PCR, antibody products & services.(Guide)
April 1, 2006... * Taq DNA polymerase (GenTaq) for PCR * DNA gel extraction or mini plasmid prep * PCR tubes, strips and plates * Antibody (Abs) production services * Abs against chromosome 21 proteins * Abs for signal transduction...

NucleoSpin[R] RNA/protein, 1 kit/2 results.(Guide)
April 1, 2006... Simultaneous RNA and protein extraction from the same experimental sample is a great and fast growing demand for researchers interested in gene regulation mechanism. With the new NucleoSpin[R] RNA/Protein kit, MACHEREY-NAGEL has...

Still optically monitoring your cells?(Guide)
April 1, 2006... ECIS[TM] Automated cell monitoring Real time, Quantitative Measurements of * Signal transduction * Wound healing/Migration * Cell-ECM Interactions * Invasion * Barrier function * Effects of Flow Over 150+...

Easy expansion of human and mouse T cells.(Guide)
April 1, 2006... Dynabeads[R] are the first artificial antigen-presenting cells to provide simultaneous signals to TCR/CD3 and CD28 for full activation and expansion of human T cells, human regulatory T cells and mouse T cells. * Quick, gentle and...

Aprotinin serine protease inhibitor.(Guide)
April 1, 2006... Aprotinin Pentapharm is ideally suited for protein isolation and biopharmaceutical downstream purification. Inhibits undesired activity of serine proteases. Useful in immunodiffusion radioimmunoassay, ELISAs and assays for coagulation factors...

The first DNA sequence database.(FOUNDATIONS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... In the middle of 1981, Greg Hamm was a 30-year-old software programmer newly hired by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to head up its DNA data library--a database that did not yet exist. So he set about making one. "We had journals...