Testing rats for Botox.(Notebook)

Botox users, consider yourselves warned. New research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, could reveal the secret of your seemingly improbable youthfulness. Neuroscientist Edwin Chapman and his colleagues describe in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1) a method that, instead of relying on functional or biochemical methods to detect the toxin (which can take days), can spot the botulinum toxin in living cells far more quickly.

The researchers successfully tested the technique in vitro using cells from rats, a species not known for using Botox to shave years off their whiskered faces. The method attaches two proteins (CFP and YFP), …