Japanese researchers who reprogrammed pluripotency into adult human skin cells say they have improved the technique, according to a paper published online today (Nov. 30) in Nature Biotechnology.

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and his colleagues originally used four transcription factors to induce pluripotency in... Click to continue

Videos are on the rise in science publishing, as we reported in August. On Friday, BioMed Central, sister company to The Scientist, joined the video crew with the launch of its YouTube channel. Unlike efforts such as the video methods journal, JoVE, the 45 videos hosted on the channel so far consist of authors and editors talking... Click to continue

A Surrey, UK, lab thought to be the source of a foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in August again ran afoul of biosafety practices last week, when a leaking valve likely released live FMD virus into a contained drainage system.

Merial, a company on the site that makes FMD vaccine, had been banned from using live virus after the August outbreak, but the government restored its license to work with FMD earlier this month when biosafety... Click to continue

The fifth-largest academic journal publisher, SAGE, yesterday (November 20) announced an agreement with open access science and medicine publisher, Hindawi, to launch a new series of open access journals, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Publication will be funded by author charges, using a ... Click to continue

Earlier this week, The Scientist reported on a trial comparing the efficacy of a hypertension drug, nebivolol, in African American and white American patients. It seems that Forest Laboratories, the drug's manufacturer, is making all kinds of comparisons for marketing purposes, and resorting to some questionable practices to do so.

The Wall Street Journal Health Blog... Click to continue

This year's iGEM winners tackled a rather abstract information processing task, but many of the projects had direct health applications. In addition to the bactoblood and HIV project, there was a heart stem cell project, non-antibiotic resistant bacteria, a detection system for infections, and more.

I asked Jeff Way of Merck KGaA in Germany, who was at the Jamboree as a judge, whether pharma and biotech companies were starting to apply... Click to continue

The envelope please: This year's iGEM winner is Peking University.

The team's concept was to create division of labor among bacteria. A group of bacteria can respond to stimuli by adapting to different conditions. But what if the group could split into two, with each population able to behave differently in the same environment? So the team engineered two different systems, which controlled the spatial and temporal dimensions of... Click to continue

After yesterday's intensive day of presentations, some in the iGEM crowd this morning look a little worse for wear. Several are sporting a square orange and black stamp on their cheeks, the stamp of the UCSF all-high school team. It got a little crazy at the pub last night, one of the organizers told me. (I can only guess that it was the legal-aged mentors, and not the high school students, who stayed out late stamping faces.)

The UCSF team, whose project focused on intercellular organelles,... Click to continue

It's like a dorm party... but not. It's getting close to 9, the techno is blasting, a leftover spread of Mediterranean food goes dry on a long table, and hundreds of undergrads stand around talking in groups. Many of them are still standing by their posters -- their last chance to show off their work before the judges choose the winners tomorrow morning.

The team from last year's winning institution, the University of Ljubljana in... Click to continue

Some of you may have read a recent New Yorker expose adulterated olive oil -- in my family of cooks, it caused quite a panic. Well, one of the iGEM teams just presented a solution, and appropriately, it's the team from Naples, Italy.

The problem, they say, is that currently all the quality control methods for olive oil are done by large expensive machines. Technically, for an olive oil to be... Click to continue

A guy named Austin was wandering the halls of MIT's Stata Center this afternoon with a plasma bag. Its contents are a little darker and a little grayer than you'd expect blood to be - maybe the color of well-peppered Bloody Mary mix. It's also a little thinner. "We're having problems with the expression level of the hemoglobin," Austin told me when I poked at the bag.

Austin Day is the brains behind the bactoblood project - bacterially produced hemoglobin - brought by the UC Berkeley team. I... Click to continue

Covering iGEM is hard: choosing presentations based on what sounds cool won?t get you very far, because almost everything sounds cool. Who would say no to a microbial mass production system for blood (Berkeley) or RNAi components strung together to create a way to cure cancer (Princeton)? But with most of the projects so conceptually ambitious, one of the judges told me, sifting through them really requires squaring what was originally planned with what got accomplished.

Ten or so groups have... Click to continue

For most of the day today, the iGEM teams are breaking up into groups in which students present their projects. The range of projects is pretty dizzying. They are loosely divided into five tracks - energy, information processing, basic foundational projects, health and environment.

I started out with a team called the Missouri Miners, from the University of Missouri, Rolla, who showed off two projects they had attempted - a biological timer, which fluoresces for a set amount of time when a... Click to continue

I arrived in Cambridge tonight and headed out to a pub near MIT to find the iGEM crew, who were supposed to meet up for an informal get-together before the Jamboree, iGEM's international synthetic biology contest, starts tomorrow (Nov. 3). After peeking into a few bars I spotted a small group of young people wearing green t-shirts decorated with biotech company names and O-H molecules.... Click to continue

This weekend, 59 teams of undergraduates will be descending on Cambridge, Mass., for the 4th annual International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, aka the iGEM Jamoboree. I'm heading up there tomorrow to blog the event live.

The event is a synthetic biology contest that grew out of a short course held at MIT in 2003. Students - mostly undergrads - spend the summer designing and building genetic machines from a standard set of... Click to continue