#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.
The molecule, TIC10, activates the gene for a protein called TRAIL (tumour-necrosis-factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand),
which apoptosis#or cell death#is induced in cancer cells immediately next to healthy ones. Healthy cells are stimulated also to increase the amount of TRAIL receptors on their cell surface.
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,
So-called"bioprinters naturally use cells rather than plastics to create organic structures. However this technique can damage the printed cells,
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.
Seven Bridges Genomics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aims to be accessible to people with no expertise in bioinformatics,
and provides access to free tools for designing custom-made analysis pipelines. Ingenuity Systems in Redwood City, California, allows users to upload a list of mutations in a person s genome,
and finds those most likely to cause disease. Personalis, down the road in Menlo Park, offers sequencing services and interpretation for clinicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Last week, the company won a $1. 53-million contract with the US Department of veterans affairs to look for genetic variants in samples from as many as one million military veterans
when bioinformaticians started up a flurry of companies, most of which were unsuccessful because the path from a genetic-disease marker to a profitable drug has not been straight#forward.
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.
but that may soon change due to recent research on ultifunctional fibersdone by MIT Bioelectronics group.
so harder implants that don bend with their surrounding biological environment can easily shift and move to a different area than they were implanted,
Scientists at MIT Bioelectronics group not as interested in creating applications for these new multifunctional fibers as they are in perfecting the technology,
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.
Now, as part of a joint international project, a team of young researchers at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering at Meduni Vienna has succeeded in identifying the mechanisms the spinal cord uses to control this muscle activity.
explains study author Simon Danner, from the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering of Meduni Vienna.
However, in recent years neuroscientists have shown in animal models that it is possible to reverse the debilitating effects of these gene mutations.
whether different gene mutations disrupt common physiological processes. If this were the case, a treatment developed for one genetic cause of autism
Different genes, same consequences Another cause of autism and intellectual disability is the loss of a series of genes on human chromosome 16,
Current research indicates that well over 100 distinct gene mutations can manifest as intellectual disability and autism.
by removing a biochemical lampthat prevents connections between nerve cells in the brain from growing stronger.
Studies at other institutions have identified mutations in the gene for Syngap associated with autism and intellectual disability.
To see how these mutations affect the protein function the Johns Hopkins research team altered their lab-grown cells
so that they had genes with one of three of these mutations. All three of the disability-associated mutations showed similar effects:
Compared to normal neurons, there was less Syngap in synapses when they were at rest, but activating Camkii did not noticeably change anything. his gives us a much clearer idea of how some Syngap mutations cause problems in the brain,
Huganir says. The findings may one day lead to drugs or other interventions that would lessen the effects of the mutations,
he says. Other authors on the paper are Menglong Zeng and Mingjie Zhang, both of Hong kong University of Science and Technology c
The study, conducted by an international ALS consortium that includes scientists and clinicians from Columbia University Medical center (CUMC), Biogen idec,
and Hudsonalpha Institute for Biotechnology, was published today in the online edition of Science. he identification of TBK1 is exciting for understanding ALS pathogenesis,
but that they can help pinpoint key biological pathways relevant to ALS that then become the focus of targeted drug development efforts,
said study co-leader David B. Goldstein, Phd, professor of genetics and development and director of the new Institute for Genomic Medicine at CUMC.
caused by dozens of different genetic mutations, which wee only beginning to discover. The more of these mutations we identify
the better we can deciphernd influencehe pathways that lead to disease. The other co-leaders of the study are Richard M. Myers, Phd, president and scientific director of Hudsonalpha,
and Tim Harris, Phd, DSC, Senior vice president, Technology and Translational Sciences, Biogen idec. hese findings demonstrate the power of exome sequencing in the search for rare variants that predispose individuals to disease and in identifying potential
especially in the context of precision medicine and whole-genome sequencing.""Industry and academia often do things together,
but this is a perfect example of a large, complex project that required many parts, with equal contributions from Biogen idec.
TBK1 mutations appeared in about 1 percent of the ALS patients large proportion in the context of a complex disease with multiple genetic components, according to Dr. Goldstein.
and now we have shown that mutations in either gene are associated with ALS, said Dr. Goldstein. hus there seems to be no question that aberrations in the pathways that require TBK1
and mouse models with mutations in TBK1 or OPTN to study ALS disease mechanisms and to screen for drug candidates.
said Tom Maniatis, Phd, the Isidore S. Edelman Professor, chair of biochemistry and molecular biophysics,
senior researcher at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics. ut in recent years wee developed much more sensitive methods of analysis that allow us to see which genes are active in individual cells.
The study was carried out by Sten Linnarsson and Jens Hjerling-Leffler research groups at the department of medical biochemistry and biophysics, in particular by Amit Zeisel and Ana Muños Manchado.
Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular biology. Dr Samuel Cohen a Research Fellow at St john College, Cambridge,
While some recent AD genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which search the entire human genome for small variations,
have suggested that MAPT is associated with increased risk for AD, other studies have found no association.
principal investigator of the Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium and a study co-author. n important aspect was the collaborative nature of this work.
Thanks to our collaborators from the Consortium, the International Parkinson Disease Genetics Consortium, the Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer Disease, the Cohorts for Heart and Aging research in Genomic Epidemiology, decode Genetics and the Demgene cohort,
professor of biological psychiatry at the University of Oslo and a senior co-author. Sudha Seshadri, MD, professor of neurology at the Boston University School of medicine, the principal investigator of the Neurology Working group within the Cohorts for Heart and Aging research in Genomic Epidemiology consortium and a study co-author added:
The recent association of genetic variation in the MAPT gene with AD risk and the emerging availability of tau imaging are now leading to a recognition that perhaps tau changes are key in the pathophysiologic pathway of AD
and quantifying the biochemical effects of therapeutic interventions, said Anders M. Dale, Phd, professor of neurosciences and radiology and director of the Center for Translational Imaging and Precision Medicine at UC San diego and the study senior author e
About this genetics research Other authors of the report include Kalyan Kondapalli, Jose Llongueras, Vivian Capilla-Gonzalez, Hari Prasad, Anniesha Hack, Christopher Smith and Hugo Guerrero
They#ve also known that chromosome 21 plays a role in the disease due to Alzheimer s-like symptoms in people with Down syndrome (with three copies of chromosome 21.
This chromosome contains the APP gene which can lead to production of the primary component of the damaging amyloid plaques.
#In 2001 Chun was the first to report that the brain contains many distinct genomes within its cells#much like the colorful tiles in an artist#s mosaic.#
#Researchers Enlarge Brain Samples Making Them Easier to Image New technique enables nanoscale-resolution microscopy of large biological specimens.
says Ed Boyden, an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. Boyden is the senior author of a paper describing the new method in the Jan 15 online edition of Science.
in biology that right where things get interesting, says Boyden, who is a member of MIT Media Lab and Mcgovern Institute for Brain Research.
And the cast itself is swollen, unimpeded by the original biological structure, Tillberg says. The MIT team imaged this astwith commercially available confocal microscopes,
a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical school who was not part of the research team. MIT researchers led by Ed Boyden have invented a new way to visualize the nanoscale structure of the brain and other tissues.
and map how they connect to each other across large regions. here are lots of biological questions where you have to understand a large structure,
The discovery, published in the scientific journal Nature Chemical Biology, comes on the heels of a study published last month in the journal PLOS ONE.
In Monday's study, synthetic biologists at the University of California at Berkeley inserted an enzyme gene from beets to coax yeast into converting tyrosine--an amino acid easily derived from sugar--into a compound called reticuline.
an MIT professor of biological engineering, was quoted as saying by Britain's Science Media Center.""The information in this paper, combined with DNA synthesis,
and bioengineering and Isy Goldwasser, is a wireless device that pairs with an iphone or ipad via a Bluetooth connection (Android app coming soon).
scientists working in the field of tissue engineering have been unable to construct a basic framework to hold together all of the biological components that make up a leg or arm,
According to the press release, uscle progenitors were injected directly into the matrix sheaths that define the position of each muscle. he leg was left to culture in a bioreactor for five days.
After two weeks, the scientists removed the leg from the bioreactor to analyze it. Tests confirmed the presence of vascular cells along blood vessel walls
Dr. Bruce Conklin, a stem cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, along with colleagues developed these tiny hearts using stem cells derived from skin tissue.
microbiologist Kim Lewis, along with his colleague at Northeastern University in Boston, microbial ecologist Slava Epstein, described a new technique for coaxing bacteria to grow:
and grow new bacterial coloniesany scooped out of soil in the backyard of microbiologist Losee Ling,
when a small percentage of microbes escape an antibiotic because of a mutation and then those bacteria multiply.)
says Helen Zgurskaya, a biochemist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who studies how bacteria become susceptible to antibiotics. his study demonstrates that unculturable bacteria have unrecognized new,
a microbiologist at the University of California, San francisco. But there are many paths to developing resistance,
One important piece of evidence will be the genetic sequence of the virus. Ben Embarek says Korea has agreed to share samples with several labs working on MERS,
while others hunt for the virus own genetic material. Some assays can measure the presence or absence of longer-lasting antibodies that can linger for decades after an infection.
Researchers led by biologist Stephen Elledge of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical school wanted to develop a test that could look at every current or past infection in one fell swoop.
however, says microbiologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University. efore we view this as a definitive definition of what people have been infected with,
A team of bioengineers and geneticists has designed a device that can suspend a single living cell between magnets and measure its density based on how high it floats.
a cancer biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center in Dallas. Researchers have used magnets before to levitate whole creatures,
explains Utkan Demirci, a bioengineer at Stanford university in Palo alto, California. But he and his colleagues were looking for new ways to manipulate
says Will Grover, a bioengineer at the University of California, Riverside, who was involved not in the new work.
and memory, says biologist Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley, who recently published a scientific paper showing that targeting a separate molecule can lower levels of B2m
Now, a team of physicists and biologists have gone a key step further, coaxing a cell to envelop a tiny plastic sphere that acts like a resonant cavityhown in green in the micrograph abovehus placing a whole laser within a cell.
Scientists have been hunting for years for mutations in crystallin proteins that might offer new insights
molecular biologist Ling Zhao may have done just that. Her team came up with the eye drop idea after finding that children with a genetically inherited form of cataracts shared a mutation that stopped the production of lanosterol, an important steroid in the body.
When their parents did not have the same mutation, the adults produced lanosterol and had no cataracts.
So the researchers wondered: What if lanosterol helped prevent or reduce cataracts? The team tested a lanosterol-laden solution in three separate experiments.
a molecular biologist at Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge not affiliated with the study. He has been investigating cataract proteins
and molecular biologist at UC San diego, is looking forward to seeing what the lanosterol drops can dissolve next. think the natural next step is looking to translate it into humans,
Traditional methods for mapping HIV genetic material use long strings of these nucleotides, called oligomers, to find and bind to complementary strands of DNA or RNA in sample tissues.
allowing researchers to create an image of precisely where the viral genetic material is dispersed throughout the tissue sample.
but it also converts to a DNA form that allows it to weave its genes into a human chromosome.
so seeing molecules would suggest something is replenishing them hinting at possible biological activity. Europa is sized a good moon
what was going on what you might call proto-biology before life even got started he says.
if you have imaging probes that can sense specific biomolecules Johnson says. Dual actionjohnson and his colleagues designed the particles
and obtain real-time biochemical information about disease sites and also healthy tissues which is not always straightforward.
#Bacteria become genomic tape recorders MIT engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E coli into a long-term storage device for memory.
You can store very long-term information says Timothy Lu an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering.
The new strategy described in the Nov 13 issue of the journal Science overcomes several limitations of existing methods for storing memory in bacterial genomes says Lu the paper s senior author.
After the DNA is produced the recombinase inserts the DNA into the cell s genome at a preprogrammed site.
We can target it anywhere in the genome which is why we re viewing it as a tape recorder
If the DNA is inserted into a nonfunctional part of the genome sequencing the genome will reveal
These engineered bacteria could also be used as biological computers Lu says adding that they would be particularly useful in types of computation that require a lot of parallel processing such as picking patterns out of an image.
Instead the vast majority of this genetic material is found within the trillions of microorganisms that call our bodies home.
and Therapeutics a new interdisciplinary center dedicated to advancing the understanding of the microbiome s role in human biology
and operations for the first five years the center will fuel collaborations at the junction of clinical practice basic research computational biology
but our ability to translate this data into usable knowledge is lagging behind says Arup K. Chakraborty the Robert T. Haslam (1911) Professor of Chemical engineering Physics Chemistry and Biological engineering at MIT and director of the MIT Institute
The new center s co-directors are Eric Alm an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT and Ramnik Xavier chief of gastroenterology and director of the Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel
Molecular biologists microbiologists and cell biologists seek to understand microbe/microbe and microbe/host cell function and communication he says.
Immunologists geneticists and genomics researchers drive Progress to this wealth of information clinicians contribute patient-based insights and gain potential targets for therapeutics.
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