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

Well the Keystone meeting on Epigenetics and Chromatin Modeling in Development has wrapped, and the reaction from participants was very positive, indication that the epigenetics field -- which has broadened significantly to include much of the chromatin and transcriptional control community -- is set for some significant findings. Many told me that the selection of talks was the best they?d heard in years. ?I didn?t fall asleep during any of them,? said one meeting-goer as we waited for the... Click to continue

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

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

I didn?t want to give the impression from my last two posts that it?s all RNAi all the time at this year?s Keystone Symposium on Epigenetics and Chromatin Remodeling in Development. Polycomb group complex (PgC) proteins, their binding sites, and/or how they set up silencing states in development has been a feature in practically every other talk or poster, here. Not simply a 60-year old vagary of Drosophila development that gave rise to wacky phenotypes, PgCs deserve more respect says... Click to continue

Repeats appear important in gene silencing. Repeats appear important in gene silencing. At least two talks at the Keystone Symposium Conference on Epigenetics and Chromatin Remodeling in Development implicate the power of tandem repeats in RNA-interference induced silencing. Rob Martienssen of Cold Spring Harbor talked about silencing of transposable elements (in keeping with the grand history of his institution). He explained how his lab has found that RNAi-independent and RNAi-dependent... Click to continue

A funny thing happened to the Keystone symposium on epigenetics and development, apparently a few years back it got invaded by chromatin people. At my first day at the symposium, I uncovered just a little grumbling that the histone modifications that control the winding and packing of DNA and that ultimately grant or restrict access to transcriptional machinery don?t quite qualify as epigenetic marks. The players in the field have yet to demonstrate that they are heritable said Ueli... Click to continue

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

Noted Harvard epidemiologist Meir Stampfer has decided that he no longer wants to publicly tout the benefits of beer anymore at benefits sponsored by? surprise, Anheuser-Busch, brewer of approximately 30 beers in the U.S. alone. The researcher?s decision to affiliate himself with the company sparked outrage among some addiction experts, who accused Stampfer of unethical practice.

Stampfer defended himself by arguing that he was simply... Click to continue

Despite the fact that he appears to have fabricated at least half of the patients in a 2005 Lancet study , Norwegian researcher Jon Sudbo has an opinion on the ethics of 'rigorously conducted clinical trials' ? or at least he did in 2001. The results of such trials, he wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine ? which is now investigating his work published there ? 'make up the foundation for what we like to term... Click to continue

A week later: I have been revitalized and am sitting comfortably in my office at Ferghana Partners in New York. I have written 50 meeting memo?s and have cultivated some very interesting new business. H&Q 2006 was an incredible success!



Looking back on the conference, I think 2006 is poised to be an incredible year in the biotechnology industry: I am excited to do business and so are others. Although it is tougher for companies to go public?valuation expectations have been tough to swallow... Click to continue

When you come across a worst case scenario -- say someone who had a well-paying job but fell on hard times and lost everything ? do you think of that person as an outlier, or an example of what can happen to anyone?

The other day, I heard about Jo A. Del Rio, a former Merck employee. She brought home an annual salary of $80,000 until January, 2004, when she was laid off during downsizing. Soon after, a series of medical problems depleted her financial reserves, and she ended up living in a... Click to continue

Now that 21 people have been infected with avian flu in Turkey, there has been a proliferation of news about the bird which Ben Franklin, who celebrated his 300th birthday yesterday , suggested as the US?s national bird . It turns out that turkeys are remarkably intelligent and technologically sophisticated.

Today?s winner: ... Click to continue

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

As if things weren't bleak enough for disgraced South Korean cloner Hwang Woo-suk, it emerged last night that he has been offered public support by Clonaid, the UFO cult founded by a former French sports journalist. In a posting on its website, Clonaid, which claims it has cloned several human embryos but is keeping the results secret, tries to draw a parallel between Hwang's recent difficulties and its own activities.



The website asks: 'It is... Click to continue

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

Rice University physicist Neal Lane penned an interesting op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today. On the occasion of Benjamin Franklin?s 300th birthday, Lane asks (and takes a stab at answering) the question, what would Ben make of this whole intelligent design hubbub While unquestionably a man of God, Franklin reveled in science. Lane writes that Franklin would most certainly have cut any purported ID theorist a... Click to continue

Today?s science fraud revelation is that a study published in The Lancet, purportedly demonstrating that common painkillers could protect against oral cancer, was pure fiction.

The response of The Lancet Editor Richard Horton, as quoted by the BBC "The peer-review process is good at picking up poorly designed studies, but it is not designed to pick up fabricated... Click to continue

So, just how untrustworthy is the stem-cell literature? Very, according to one of the field's leading lights, David Shaywitz of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He's the author of an op-ed piece that was meant to defend the beleaguered field of stem-cell research, despite fraudulent papers from the lab of Korean researcher Hwang... Click to continue

I received an Email advertising the new journal Autophagy today. In a list of features about the journal, the Email adds:

?We also point out that we have an expedited review process if your paper was rejected from a ?flashy? journal; we all know that even solid papers do not always get accepted into the top general audience journals.?

The policy is expanded on a bit in their ... Click to continue

With the conference winding down, you can clearly feel the change in emotion throughout the halls, lobby and conference rooms of the St. Frances. What was once a vibrant and high energy crowd is now a dwindling group of tired and emotionally drained individuals. To navigate through the H&Q conference successfully, one needs stamina, good shoes and a strong posture.



Call it coincidence, but the majority of companies I met with on Thursday were in the CNS field. My conclusion: The majority... Click to continue

My time has been spent in ?Europe.? In the last two days, I have been to Italy four times, London and France each twice and made brief stops in Germany and Switzerland. The series of meetings that I have had with European companies has caused me to come to the conclusion that companies in that region are undervalued, undermanaged, underappreciated and unhappy with the lack of availabe capital. The companies are therefore looking to gain additional investor support from US venture capitalists.... Click to continue

Some acts of scientific creativity deserve recognition.

After finding her dead cat, a Virginia woman named Marylin Christian had a number one suspect: her neighbor?s dog, a German Shepard mix named Lucky.

According to the Washington Post the woman, armed with memories of TV crime shows, asked Lucky?s owners for samples of saliva and fur. They obliged.

Her county vet concluded that Lucky?s fur... Click to continue

A beautiful day in San Francisco and although many of the meetings at this year's H&Q conference seemed to spill into the streets surrounding the St. Francis Hotel, with men in suits or casual attire mingling in groups of two and three on the sidewalks, the lobby and hallways of the Hotel are still packed full of industry executives looking to make things happen. That's right, my first impression of this year's conference, and perhaps indicative of what's to come in 2006: people want to do... Click to continue

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

I found out today that I got lucky. Human cloning has always received the lion's share of headlines, but I've always been more fascinated by the cloning of the lions ? animal cloning, in particular the quirky but earnest gang that would like to clone your pet for royal sums. So I might have felt vindicated by today's news ? which I reported on here ? that while Woo-Suk Hwang's claims on human cloning were based on fraud, his cloning of... Click to continue

I was grateful for the invitation to witness the return to Earth of NASA?s Stardust mission broadcast live from the American Museum of Natural History this Sunday. While the notion of roaming the halls of a favorite childhood retreat at 5am is appealing, I?m even more enthralled by the possibilities of Stardust, an unmanned spacecraft which captured particles from the comet Wild 2 offering the possibility of a glimpse into the very birth of... Click to continue

Every January, the movers and shakers of biotech come to the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco to see and be seen, exchange information and move money by funding companies and forming partnerships and other alliances. Thousands of bankers, analysts and company executives mix and mingle at JP Morgan's Annual Healthcare Conference (often still called the H&Q), setting the tone for the year in biotech. Those attending the invitation-only conference go to the company presentations and meet in... Click to continue

An entirely appropriate stew of scientific vexation and mortification has accompanied revelations that the incredible Korean achievements in human embryonic cloning and stem cell research are exactly that: incredible. But midst the hand-wringing over failures of peer review--and justified alarm over the future of human embryo clones and stem cell research--an intriguing fact has been obscured. Woo Suk Hwang would still be a rock-star equivalent, and frustrated researchers would still be trying... Click to continue