NewsBlog: Big numbers, new tools at Keystone Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 31st January 2006 06:22 AM GMT] One thing's certain at the Keystone Symposia on Structural Genomics and Frontiers in Structural Biology running this week in Keystone, Colorado: there's some seriously big science going on in the world of structural biology. Aled Edwards of the University of Toronto rattled off the program goals of the ... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: KillerRed: The Hypoxia Connection Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 25th January 2006 05:35 PM GMT] A few days ago I blogged on a new fluorescent protein called KillerRed. Upon irradiation with green light KillerRed produces reactive oxygen species in sufficient quantities to kill both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. The authors suggest several potential applications, but I?ve come up with another: hypoxia research. Before I joined The Scientist I was a postdoc in Celeste Simon's lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Simon works... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: Systems biology gets a shot in the arm Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 23rd January 2006 10:42 PM GMT] A fundamental goal of systems biology is to define a biological system precisely, such that it becomes possible to predict the outcome of perturbing that system. Yesterday (Jan. 22) a team of researchers from German drug discovery firm Cellzome and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory reported in Nature a significant step toward the creation of such models, at least in budding yeast. Giulio Superti-Furga... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: Why Google is Good for Science Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 20th January 2006 10:50 PM GMT] Poking around on the iSpecies blog today, I found a comment alerting readers to an interesting little tool on the online version of Practical Fishkeeping, "the UK's best-selling aquarium magazine." Fish Mapper is an applet that plots fish distribution data, culled from an online service called ... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: Trace Archive Tops Billion-Record Mark Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 18th January 2006 02:40 PM GMT] Yesterday (Jan. 17) the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute announced that its World Trace Archive database had just crossed the 1 billion sequence mark. The Trace Archive is a collection of sequence reads, traces, and metrics from the world's sequencing facilities. It measures some 22 Terabytes in size and is doubling every 10 months, according to the press release. "To grasp how much data is in the... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: A Killer Protein Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 17th January 2006 10:09 PM GMT] This month?s Nature Biotechnology includes an article from Sergey Lukyanov that elevates fluorescent proteins from cool to killer. Lukyanov, of the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and colleagues report the isolation of a GFP variant called KillerRed that acts as a photosensitizer. Photosensitizers produce reactive oxygen species upon stimulation with light;... Click to continue Comment on this blog NewsBlog: Crystallography's Grail found in PNAS? Posted by Jeff Perkel [Entry posted at 10th January 2006 06:47 PM GMT] Researchers have, since 1988, been searching for a so-called "universal nucleant," that is, a material that will nucleate crystal formation, much as a grain of sand nucleates the formation of a pearl. Buried in the biophysics section of PNAS's January 6 Early Edition is a somewhat esoteric paper that may just end this search -- and open one of structural biology's most persistent bottlenecks, generating high-quality... Click to continue Comment on this blog

Technically Speaking Jeff Perkel Location: Philadelphia, USA Who am I? Editor at The Scientist Previous months >>   September 2006 >>   July 2006 >>   May 2006 >>   April 2006 >>   March 2006 >>   February 2006 >>   January 2006 >>   November 2005 >>   October 2005 >>   September 2005 >>   June 2005