On October 13, 2003 the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) will launch a new bioinformatics support network that is tailor-made for small companies.
It can be a lonely business being a bioinformatician in a small company. It is widely acknowledged that Europe’’s economic development is becoming increasingly dependent on small-to-medium enterprises, or SMEs (enterprises with fewer than 250 employees and an annual turnover not exceeding 50 million Euros or an annual bala
Probably, animals and human beings possess a biochemical vehicle for measuring life span. The key role in this vehicle is played by a short DNA – chronomere. The chronomeric ageing theory, based on tremendous experimental material, has been developed with support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.
Early in the 70s of the 20th century, Russian researcher Alexy Olovnikov forecast existence of the chromosomes’’ end sequences – telomer, which shorten after each cell division
Discovery of ‘hot pepper’ receptor in heart may explain chest pain, lead to new treatments
The secret to heart attack chest pain may be on the tip of your tongue.
Although they may seem unlikely bedfellows, Penn State College of Medicine researchers found evidence to suggest that the same type of nerve receptors that register the burning sensation from hot peppers in the mouth may cause the sensation of chest pain from a heart attack.
“Our study is the first to demonstrat
Dendritic cells monitor foreign substances in the body and communicate whether they present a danger to the rest of the immune system. Emory immunologists have developed a sensitive method to detect and follow dendritic cells by marking them with a change in their DNA, and have discovered that they are more numerous and longer lived than other scientists had previously observed. Their research uses a gene gun, which shoots DNA into the skin using microscopic gold pellets, and could lead to a faster a
Ecologists are taking to the trees in a bid to unravel the ecology of shell coiling in snails. Speaking at the British Ecological Society’s Annual Meeting, being held at Manchester Metropolitan University on 9-11 September 2003, Dr Paul Craze of the University of Plymouth will explain how examining the proportion of right- and left-coiling individuals in a species of Bornean tree snail could help ecologists understand how new species arise.
The vast majority of snail species are almost exclu
Puberty blues: goby fish choose their sex to find a mate
Research on the Great Barrier Reef has revealed that some young reef fish can choose when they mature and which sex they want to be when they grow up.
Research conducted by JP Hobbs, an honours student at James Cook University, Townsville, focused on a colourful goby that lives in bushy corals. The research may win him a British Council sponsored study tour of the UK.
Announcing his research results at Fresh Sc
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, has developed an experimental method that allows scientists to investigate the behavior of proteins under non-equilibrium conditions one molecule at a time, to better understand a fundamental biological process of protein folding that is important for many diseases.
The work, presented in the Aug. 29 edition of Science, marks the first time protein-folding kinetics has been monitor
A PET (positron emission tomography) scanner sensitive enough to use on laboratory mice has been developed by biomedical engineers at UC Davis. The device is already being used for studies on prostate cancer.
“We think it’s the highest resolution scanner in existence. We can see things we couldn’t see before,” said Simon Cherry, professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis, who leads the research group.
PET scanners have become widely used in medical imaging, alongside
Conservation International (CI) announced today the discovery of a tiny fish with a blood red tail in Venezuela’s Upper Caura River. Previously unknown to science, the bloodfin tetra (Aphyocharax yekwanae), is described in the March 2003 edition of the journal, “Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters.”
The two-inch-long (50.7-mm-long) tetra is only one of 10 new species of fish found during a single expedition by CI’s Aquatic Rapid Assessment Program (AquaRAP) to the Caura River Basin i
With the full sequence of the human genome now in hand, scientists are turning renewed attention to the molecular processes that regulate the genes encoded by DNA. Estimates are that only a tenth of all genes are expressed at any given time. What controls when and where genes are activated?
Increasingly, researchers believe that the mechanisms that govern gene activity themselves resemble a complicated non-DNA code – an intricate pattern of activity among the molecules that package and cont
Bioengineers at Dartmouth have genetically engineered yeast to produce humanized therapeutic proteins to address the manufacturing crunch currently confronting the biopharmaceutical industry. Reported in this week’s issue of Science, the researchers have re-engineered the yeast P. pastoris to secrete a complex human glycoprotein–a process offering significant advantages over current production methods using mammalian cell lines, according to the researchers.
The study, titled “Production
Get a whiff of this! A new research partnership at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using beams of chilled neutrons to determine how aroma compounds are embedded into assortments of other chemicals that carry and release fragrances in perfumes, detergents and other scented products.
Securing the elusive structural details could lead to what might be termed an “odor of magnitude” improvement in models for predicting interactions between fragrances and their molecul
Findings could drive new tissue engineering applications, organ repair and high-strength materials
Tufts University bioengineers have discovered how spiders and silkworms are able to spin webs and cocoons made of incredibly strong fibers. The answer lies in how they control the silk protein solubility and structural organization in their glands.
“This finding could lead to the development of processing methods resulting in new high-strength and high-performance materials use
The tedious laboratory trial-and-error method for refining protein/peptide-based medicines could be accelerated and complemented by an innovative in silico (on computer) protein design method, according to researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the University of California at Riverside.
Their findings, appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could drastically decrease the time it takes to move potentia
A First Step Toward Robots the Size of a Grain of Sand
Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have developed minute grains of silicon that spontaneously assemble, orient and sense their local environment, a first step toward the development of robots the size of sand grains that could be used in medicine, bioterrorism surveillance and pollution monitoring.
In a paper to be published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which will
What can bees teach us about speed shopping?
Does trading off speed for accuracy pay?
“Bumblebees have been shown to have very fine colour vision – which they can use to find up to 5,000 flowers a day,” says says Melbourne scientist Adrian Dyer who first made the observations whilst working in Germany.
Adrian’s study published in Nature casts light on how they do it – and may help us to learn from the bees how to design robot eyes in the future.
Adrian is
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