Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering.""It an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis,
"I think this is really fantastic work that represents a great integration of synthetic biology and materials engineering,"said Lingchong You, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university i
#Poop-powered airport shuttle bus hits the road in the U k. A supermarket powered by its own expired comestibles.
Importance for biology One classical way to image smaller objects without using entangled photons is to use shorter and shorter wavelengths of light.
The Japanese scientists said their research is especially important for applications in optics and biology."
"It is a very powerful tool to investigate transparent samples such as biological tissues, and, in particular, living cells, without them being damaged by intense probe light,
as biologists and doctors are unlikely to be prepared to wait hours for an image to form. o
Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired By nature The simplicity is the beauty of this technology said Ray Baughman a chemist at the University of Texas at Dallas
One of the studies'co-authors stem-cell research Yoshiki Sasai with the RIKEN Center for Developmental biology in Japan told Nature that this discovery is amazing.
The idea came from another biologist at the same facility Haruko Obokata who says it took her five years to persuade her colleagues that this technique would work.
In the latest example of biomimicry or science is inspired by nature a team of researchers in California have turned to cats
and biological applications he said s
#$1. 7 million personal submarine lets you'fly'underwater Adventurers with deep pockets can now explore the hidden depths of the ocean,
#FDA ready to regulate transgenic animals: Nature News The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has adopted a policy that will govern approval of the use of genetically engineered animals.
In the interim, researchers have pushed forward with plans to develop a wide range of transgenic animals,
whether the FDA has the necessary expertise to evaluate the environmental risks posed by transgenic animals,
That approach could end up backfiring for the FDA and for companies developing transgenic animals, Gurian-Sherman argues,
Biologists knew that bony fish a group that includes most fish apart from cartilaginous ones such as sharks
is launched today at the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute in Nairobi, which is leading the initiative.
the Wellcome Trust has joined forces with the Indian government's Department of Biotechnology to fund postdoctoral researchers in the country through a new,
pointing to possibilities such as screening large numbers of biological samples or laboratory animals all at once.""Giving people a new degree of freedom will hopefully lead to things that we haven't thought of at all. f
Nature News Genome sequences of the cold virus could reveal new secrets behind its prowess. Heidi Ledford Rhinvirus capsid A human rhinovirus capsidj-Y Sgro/UW Madison Bang in the middle of sniffle season, researchers have released the full genome sequences of more than 100 strains of the viruses
responsible for most common colds. The viruses all belong to the rhinovirus family, and have RNA genomes. Their sequences, published this week in Science1,
could be used to design new therapies against colds or to determine, for example, why one strain can cause more severe symptoms than another."
"Sniffle-omics All this havoc is caused by a tiny virus only about 30 nanometres in diameter, with a genome that is a mere 7,
000 bases long a minute speck compared with the human genome, which has more than three billion bases.
Although the genomes of a few strains of cold virus had been sequenced, no one had compiled the full sequences of the 99 strains frequently studied by researchers.
Rhinovirus genome tree The human rhinovirus genome tree (click for larger image. Science Liggett, Palmenberg and their colleagues decided to fill this gap by sequencing the reference-library strains,
and the previously reported HRV-C genomes with one another to look for patterns and evolutionary relationships (see human rhinovirus genome tree, right).
The results suggest that three of the strains may comprise a further new rhinovirus species. The sequences also indicate that
the viruses may exchange portions of their genomes a phenomenon that, until now, had not been described in rhinoviruses.
In addition, all of the strains have extremely variable RNA sequences in one specific region of the genome.
Palmenberg also believes that the genome is structured to allow ribosomes the molecular machines that read RNA and produce a protein,
to rapidly skip over regions of the genome that do not code for proteins. The mechanism may make the viruses more competitive by allowing them to synthesize their proteins more quickly,
variable viral genome sequences may not prove to be the primary determinant of virulence.""Ultimately, the immune status of the patient may have a greater impact,
he remembered a paper he had read more than a decade earlier about HIV resistance in people who carry a specific genetic mutation.
The mutation is a short deletion in the CCR5 gene. The gene encodes a receptor that HIV uses to enter immune cells called CD4+T cells.
About 1%of the European population carries the CCR5 mutation in both copies of the CCR5 gene,
making such people much less likely to contract the virus . If H tter could replace his patient's immune cells with cells that lacked the CCR5 receptor,
his patient might be less susceptible to HIV infection. The patient had 80 matches in the bone-marrow registries of the German Bone marrow Donor Center,
and H tter reasoned that one of those matches might also carry CCR5 mutations. Donor number 61 turned out to be the one,
In addition, there is another strain of HIV that does not use CCR5 receptors to invade cells.
One CCR5 inhibitor, called maraviroc, is made by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and is approved for use in the United states and Europe.
Other companies are busy developing additional CCR5-targeting drugs. Unfortunately, maraviroc does not completely prevent the virus from binding to CCR5,
and it can only be used in combination with other antiretrovirals. Basically HIV can find its way around the drug and still use CCR5
says Riley, who adds that the virus might outcompete the inhibitor, or may be able to bind to a different region of CCR5 than the drug.
Others are trying gene therapy approaches to prevent CCR5 from being made at all. For example, Riley has been collaborating with Sangamo Biosciences,
a biotechnology company based in Richmond, California, to determine whether the company's technique for snipping out targeted genes could be used to delete the CCR5 gene.
Sangamo announced last week that it has launched a Phase I clinical trial that will involve removing a sample of the participant's T cells,
deleting the CCR5 gene, and then infusing the cells back into the patient. The trial is a first step towards ascertaining the safety of the technique not its efficacy
and participants will not be conditioned to destroy their unmodified T cells s
#What causes schizophrenia?:Nature News Findings from a'brain training'study challenge theory. Researchers in Sweden have revealed a surprising change in brain biochemistry that occurs during the training of working memory,
a buffer that stores information for the few second required to solve problems or even to understand what we are reading.
The discovery may have implications for understanding disorders in which working memory is deficient such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.
"Many findings of altered brain biochemistry may simply reflect the patients'inattentiveness, he says. Klingberg says that his team's results may also have practical implications for training working memory.
#Neanderthal genome to be unveiled: Nature News The entire genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced by a team of scientists in Germany.
The group is already extracting DNA from other ancient Neanderthal bones and hopes that the genomes will allow an unprecedented comparison between modern humans and their closest evolutionary relative.
The three-year project, which cost about#5 million (US$6. 4 million), was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
computational biologist Richard Green, is coordinating the analysis of the genome's 3 billion base pairs.
Comparisons with the human genome may uncover evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans, the genomes
The genome may also deliver more details about how these species developed their different physical traits,
"says Edward Rubin, director of the US Joint Genome Institute in Walnut creek, California, which is also sequencing Neanderthal DNA
Almost all of the Neanderthal genome to be unveiled in Chicago comes from DNA extracted from a single bone originally discovered in a cave near Vindija in Croatia.
and so is well on the way to creating a library of Neanderthal genomes that would allow stronger comparisons with modern humans.
Pääbo says that his group will publish a first draft of the entire Neanderthal genome later this year,
However, some published human genomes had all their base pairs read eight to ten times before publication.
The team says that its single-read of the Neanderthal genome is sufficient for publication
Work by two independent groups will make it easier to find out the structure of single biological molecules such as proteins without destroying
Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer s molecular composition and state of progression.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008
He is one of the lead researchers in a multicenter clinical study using new exosomal diagnostic tests developed by New york city-based Exosome Diagnostics to identify a genetic mutation found exclusively in glioma, the most common form of brain cancer.
Once the specific cancer mutation is identified, clinicians will periodically draw additional bio-fluids to monitor the mutation levels to determine
whether a patient is responding to therapy. Whereas Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful tool, tumors only show up on imaging scans once they are at least one millimeter in diameter
They will be awarded every two years starting in 2014, to global leaders in the fields of sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, Chinese studies and the rule of law.
researchers warn in a study due to appear in the journal Biological Conservation1. Known as Himalayan Viagra'because of its supposed libido-boosting powers,
says one of the study s co-authors, Kamaljit Bawa, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
India and Bhutan, says Liu Xingzhong, a mycologist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology in Beijing.
from sequencing its genome to crossbreeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix,
The government has supported also work on the genetics of both the fungus and the plant. Research programmes have started in other countries, too.
And in the United kingdom, Harry Evans is working on the genome of H.#vastatrix at CABI in Egham.
In one of the first attempts to explore atmospheric microbiology at high altitude, researchers analysed air samples from a six-week hurricane-research mission by NASA in 2010.
bacteria accounted for around 20%of all particles#biological and non-biological#a higher proportion than in the near-Earth atmosphere."
says Ulrich Karlson, an environmental microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was involved not in the study."
says Konstantinos Konstantinidis, an environmental microbiologist at the Georgia Institute of technology in Atlanta and one of the study's authors.
Genetic analysis revealed that some microbes in the upper atmosphere are thought related to bacteria to catalyse ice-crystal formation and cloud condensation2.
says George Church a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, who encoded a draft of his latest book in DNA last year2."
Yoshiki Sasai, who has been wowing biologists and non-scientists alike by growing rudimentary retinas, brain parts and other tissues from stem cells (see Nature 488,444-446;
2012), has long been negotiating with the government for facilities to link basic research at the Center for Developmental biology in Kobe, where he works, with clinics and industry.
mainly to support Masayo Takahashi, who works next door at the Center for Developmental biology. Takahashi is planning the first trial of ips cells in humans,
says Anura Rambukkana, a regeneration biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who led the study.
and metabolic diseases, says Sheng Ding, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, California.
researchers have been trying to understand just how similar they are to ES cells. ips cells begin with different patterns of gene expression,
and they can also acquire mutations during the reprogramming process, which means that every ips cell must be evaluated thoroughly before it can be used in any study."
April 2009 Paper reports successful derivation of human ips cells without the integration of genetic information into the cell genome.
October 2010 Biotechnology company Geron doses first patient in world s first clinical trial to test an ES-cell product.
Former heads of the biotech company Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, last week announced an agreement to acquire stem-cell assets including the company s flagship human ES-cell trial, in
California, began selling them to cell biologists, who prize them as fluorescent imaging labels for proteins and other biological molecules.
As recently as 2010, the biomedical sector was responsible for US$48#million of $67#million in total quantum dot revenues, according to BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
#Genomes link Aboriginal australians to Indians Some Aboriginal australians can trace as much as 11%of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4, 000 years ago from India,
This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,
Irina Pugach, a postdoctoral researcher in Stoneking s laboratory, discovered signs of the Indian migration by comparing genetic variation across the entire genomes of 344 individuals, including Aboriginal australians from the Northern territory, highlanders
Pugach confirmed an ancient association between the genomes of Australians New Guineans and the Mamanwa#a Negrito group from the Philippines.
because it is absent from New Guinean and Mamanwa genomes, and it is too uniformly spread across the northern Aboriginal genomes to have come from European colonists.
The genetic mingling coincided with the arrival in Australia of microliths#small stone tools that formed the tips of weapons
and not anything like the dense, genome-wide study we carried out. A few smaller studies of MITOCHONDRIAL DNA and the Y chromosome have hinted at recent gene flow between India and Australia2, 3,
but a genome-wide study in 2010 missed it by not including any Indian populations4,
and a project that sequenced a full Aboriginal genome dismissed signs of gene flow from India as a spurious result5.
Sheila van Holst Pellekaan, a geneticist at the University of New south wales, Australia, and a co-author of the earlier genome-wide study,
welcomes the latest research, but warns that the finding is"definitely not representative of Australia,
But a legacy of distrust of biological research among aboriginal groups means that genetic studies are viewed suspiciously
the sulphur-assisted amino acid transfer is found elsewhere in biology: some bacteria rely on it to synthesize proteins.
"It s laborious and not as effective as biology, says Leigh. Leigh and other chemists have used already rotaxanes to move droplets of fluid around2;
Molecular machines inspired by biology could eventually enable chemists to build materials with a specific sequence of molecules#a strand of polystyrene in which each component bears one of a range of extra chemical groups, for example.
"That s how biology does it, so why can t we? asks Leigh s
#Nearby star is almost as old as the Universe Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars#a denizen of the Solar system's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big bang."
It was in August 2009, that Sherley and Theresa Deisher, the chief executive of AVM Biotechnology in Seattle,
says team leader S#bastien Calvignac-Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.#
a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who last year showed3 that leeches can also preserve the DNA of the animals they feed on.
#Circular RNAS throw genetics for a loop Behold the latest curio in the cabinet of RNA oddities:
naturally occurring circular RNA molecules that influence gene expression. At least some of the loops, described in two papers published this week by Nature1,
parallel universe of unexplored RNAS, says Nikolaus Rajewsky, the lead author of one of the studies and a systems biologist at the Max Delbr#ck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
or experimental artefacts, says Erik Sontheimer, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Instead,
But advances in sequencing have allowed biologists to accumulate large data sets of RNA sequences including some from RNA without tails.
Last year, Julia Salzman, a molecular biologist at Stanford university School of medicine in California, and her colleagues sent the first missive from the circular universe.
They found that it contains about 70 binding sites for a microrna called mir-7. Micrornas are short fragments of RNA that can block gene expression by binding to
"I can t think of another form we might have missed, laughs Phillip Sharp, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge."
a biologist and open-access advocate at the University of California, Berkeley, says that he is disappointed."
Biophysicist Dennis Discher, who led the work, says that he was inspired when he saw another group's work describing the structure of CD47."
#How to turn living cells into computers Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells.
Synthetic biology seeks to bring concepts from electronic engineering to cell biology, treating gene functions as components in a circuit.
a synthetic biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts who was involved not in the study. Collins developed the genetic toggle switch that helped to kick-start the field of synthetic biology more than a decade ago2.
A wide range of computational circuits for cells have been developed since, including a simple counter that Collins
a synthetic biologist at MIT who led the latest research.""We wanted to show you can assemble a bunch of simple parts in a very easy fashion to give you many types of logical functions.
Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist also at MIT, calls the artificial modules"a very digital and permanent way to store information in DNA.
#which would be important for a biologist wanting to record key moments in a cell s ancestry.
Lu says that the approach could also be useful in biotechnology. Using simple forms of these addressable switches,
Linguists routinely construct such trees using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology. The algorithm can automatically identify cognate words (ones with the same root) in the languages.
using robots to test chemicals for biological activity.""If it really works, it might provide a future model to operate early drug discovery,
is due to gaps in the range of biological targets that industry is pursuing and in the libraries of compounds screened for activity against those targets.
Any academic group or company can also propose assays to test molecules in the library for biological activity.
The hope is that members will build on the results to improve the molecules biological properties
but to identify biological pathways that might make good drug targets. The European initiative, by contrast, aims to propel drug development.
Aled Edwards leads the Structural genomics Consortium at the University of Toronto, Canada, in which some drug companies contribute both chemical analysis and screening support,
any tissue formed would yield better models of human biology than those formed from mouse cells.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania s Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory, the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative medicine and elsewhere are developing methods for bioengineering functional vessels that could someday be used to ferry blood around 3-D-printed organs.
says Jon Clardy, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, who was involved not in the work
Ewen Callaway interviews biological chemist Jon Clardy about the significance of the new technique for deciphering molecular structures.
The synthetic shell contains no genetic material and so it cannot infect the animals. But it will spur the immune system to produce antibodies that would protect them from the real virus. In 2001,
says co-author David Stuart, a structural biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who is working with the World health organization
A team led by biophysicist#Osamu Nureki, of the University of Tokyo, #reports that the membrane-bound protein is shaped like A'v',
Geoffrey Chang, a structural biologist at the University of California, San diego, says that the findings are very similar to those for the MATE protein from Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera.
and cancer biologists that this new kind of immunotherapy can work, he says. Oncologist Renier Brentjens, also at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, remembers the day that he had to tell one of the patients in the trial that the weeks of high-dose chemotherapy the 58-year-old man had endured had worked not after all."
as well as the launch of several SMALL CAR-focused biotechnology firms. And Sadelein says that he is an investigator on a trial with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston
Shining a light on the cells triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that transfer electrons along a chain of molecules#and switches the transistor on.
Other researchers are trying to repurpose the biochemistry of green algae to make biofuels, and Saraf thinks that his device could monitor how efficiently the new strains photosynthesize.
It costs less than US$1, 500 per person to have the important parts of his clients genomes sequenced.
and identify mutations that might be causing the undiagnosed diseases that afflict his clients families.
So Jalas, the centre s director of genetics resources and services, has outsourced parts of the analysis. He uploads his clients sequencing data to cloud-computing software platforms
Jalas and the way he works represent a new and mostly untapped market for a new crop of genetics interpretation and analysis firms,
which will be touting for customers at a meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19-23 march.
"It s a huge unmet need, says David Ferreiro, a biotechnology analyst with investment bank Oppenheimer & Company in New york,
which provides genetic analysis software on its cloud-based platform and allows users to upload and run their own algorithms.
Ingenuity Systems in Redwood City, California, allows users to upload a list of mutations in a person s genome,
Personalis, down the road in Menlo Park, offers sequencing services and interpretation for clinicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
and clinical geneticists may be uneasy about uploading data to the cloud.""It s your licence and your lab that go on the line
says Elizabeth Worthey, director of genomic informatics at the Human and Molecular genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
and is optimized to run genome-analysis software. Knome of Cambridge Massachusetts, announced last year that it plans to sell $125, 000 genome-analysis machines for use in customers labs (see Nature 490,157;
2012). ) It seems unlikely that any single analysis company will rule the market; the range of customers who need to interpret sequence data is growing,
) Craig Smith, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will lead an initial assessment of seafloor life for Lockheed s project, gathering baseline data for the potential harvest zone
says Charles Brown, a biologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and one of the authors of the study.
Yuste has been leading the call for a big biology project2 that would do just that in the human brain,
and assembled the complete genome of the new virus. The virus was found in every one of the eight horses,
dengue fever and hepatitis C. It is associated most closely with a genus of newly discovered viruses called Pegivirus,
but this time,"we had five microbiologists on board, says Lever. The team, which included scientists from six different countries, drilled through 265 metres of sediment
#Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA TESTING of seized ivory If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight,
because it was the first time that the entire COP acknowledged the value and need for DNA TESTING for the origin of poached ivory.
says Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory.
so harder implants that don bend with their surrounding biological environment can easily shift and move to a different area than they were implanted,
Using the brain known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state.
and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.
The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac laboratory.
and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseasesspecially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.
the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Biomedical engineering and senior associate dean for research for the Pratt School of engineering,
and William Krauss, professor of biomedical engineering, medicine and nursing at Duke university. The research was supported by NIH Grants R01ar055226 and R01ar065873 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin disease and UH2TR000505 from the NIH Common Fund for the Microphysiological Systems Initiative.
These biomimetic constructs exhibit aligned architecture, multinucleated and striated myofibers, and a Pax7+cell pool.
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