Using high-tech robots and old-fashioned hard labor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have measured the abundance and pinpointed the cellular locations of more than 4,000 proteins in yeast.
Proteins are the workhorse molecules of the cell. They catalyze reactions, transport molecules within the cell and switch genes on and off. Measuring the abundance of and identifying the cellular locations of yeast proteins will be invaluable in helping to understand the complex biology of a re
First comprehensive view of protein activity in higher organism
UCSF scientists have developed a set of powerful tools that allow researchers to look in unprecedented detail at the full complement of thousands of proteins acting and interacting in a living organism. They have used the new tools to mine nearly the entire proteome of an organism – discovering what proteins are active in each cell, where they are active and in what quantity.
The results, published in two papers
During a recent submersible dive 3,000 feet down in the Gulf of Maine a HARBOR BRANCH scientist and sub pilot had the first face-to-face meeting ever in the deep sea with a rare Greenland shark. The docile 15-foot creature gently rammed into the submersible’s clear front sphere before turning and swimming slowly away. The entire encounter was captured on video, a clip of which can be viewed by clicking under the shark’s photo at: http://www.at-sea.org/missions/maineevent4/day14.html
HARBOR
Writing in this week’s issue of Nature, Professor Paul Pearson relates how he discovered an account of the theory – regarded as one of the most important in the history of science – in a rare 1794 publication by geologist, James Hutton. Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. Professor Pearson tracked down a copy, which runs to three volumes and more than 2000 pages, in the National Library of Scotland. Couched in the middle of the second volume is a whole chapter on the selection
Contrary to what your music teacher told you, it does not take decades of piano practice to learn to play phrases on the piano without looking at your fingers. A brain map linking finger movements with particular notes begins to form within minutes of starting training, according to research published this week in BMC Neuroscience. Recent brain imaging studies of professional musicians have demonstrated that silent tapping of musical phrases can stimulate auditory areas of the cortex and hea
Nature has evolved clever ways to prevent animals from different species from successfully reproducing. As published in the upcoming issue of Genes & Development, molecular biologists at UC Irvine are gaining a better understanding as to how.
In the October 15th issue, Drs. Noriko Kamei and Charles Glabe report on the identification of a receptor on the surface of sea urchin eggs that regulates the species-specific adhesion of sperm.
External fertilization can be risky business, e
In line with the dogma of molecular biology “DNA makes RNA makes protein”, RNA molecules have largely been thought of as intermediaries between the information encoded in the genome and the proteins that do the work. More recently, however, it has become clear that RNAs play far more active roles in most if not all plant and animal species.
We know that small RNAs that do not encode proteins themselves can regulate messenger RNA molecules that do. They bind to their specific targets, which
Findings shed light on the evolution of human cognition, the capacity for long lifespan and the potential for neurodegenerative disease
A research team from the Salk Institute, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), has identified genes in the cerebral cortex that differ in levels of activity between humans and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. These findings, which appear in the
Size matters, but so does shape, at least in the world of semiconducting nanocrystals, report chemists at Washington University in St. Louis.
Their findings, published in the August 2003 issue of Nature Materials, demonstrate experimentally that the shape of a semiconductor nanocrystal can affect its electronic and optical properties. The study, led by graduate student Heng Yu and William E. Buhro, Ph. D., professor of chemistry in Arts & Science, is the first comprehensive compariso
A team of University of California scientists has identified a gene that controls the production by terrestrial plants of methyl halides, gaseous compounds that contribute to the destruction of ozone in the stratosphere.
The discovery of the gene, detailed in the October 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, is important because it now provides scientists with a genetic tool with which to probe how and why plants produce methyl halides. The identification of the gene should also help res
Appear to “Assimilate” Arm As If it Were Their Own
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have taught rhesus monkeys to consciously control the movement of a robot arm in real time, using only signals from their brains and visual feedback on a video screen. The scientists said that the animals appeared to operate the robot arm as if it were their own limb.
The scientists and engineers said their achievement represents an important step toward technology that could ena
Discovery shows power of mouse genome to identify human genes for rare genetic diseases
In a small town on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, people are living with a serious neurological disorder, called Cayman ataxia, found nowhere else in the world.
People born with this rare, inherited condition have poor muscle coordination, some degree of mental retardation, uncontrollable head and eye movements and difficulty speaking or walking.
Now, in a discovery that
Mother Goose tells us that boys are made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” She was clearly misinformed about the snails and tails, but she was on to something with the snips. What you really need to build a boy is a “Y” chromosome, and it turns out that SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), known by the biotech cognoscente as simply “snips,” can be helpful in sorting out who fathered the boy. If DNA can be thought of as an instruction book for building a specific person, then SNPs are sing
By taking a fresh approach to an old problem, University of California, San Diego biologists and colleagues at other institutions have found a new gene essential for plant growth, a discovery that could lead to the design of better herbicides and even novelty plants.
Despite 100 years of research on auxin, a plant hormone essential in regulating plants’ development and responses to their surroundings, including the ability of plants to grow toward light, much remains unknown about how auxin
Large-scale genetic research carried out by Russian and American scientists have proved that contemporary mankind originated from a very small group of people. Common ancestors have been discovered for the entire population of many billions inhabiting all five continents of the Earth: these are two thousand primeval hunters-gatherers who used to live in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. New data has been also obtained about the rates and directions of human beings’ prehistoric evolution, and the wa
Walking down a dark alley late at night is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Your heart starts racing, your palms get clammy and you get ready to run. Now researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit information about your surroundings to your organs, enabling them to respond appropriately.
The research, to be published on Friday in BMC Neuroscience, has shown that neurons originating in high-order brain structures transmit signals about the
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