Chromosomal Test By Molecular Biologists Determines Cancer Spread

April 1, 2007 — A new biopsy test, created by molecular biologists, can tell ocular melanoma patients if theirs is the kind that will spread. Using very thin needles, surgeons collect cells from tumors and analyze them. If tumors are missing a copy of chromosome three, patients are at high risk of having their cancer spread. While there’s no cure for ocular melanoma, patients who are at higher risk can be followed more closely and put on experimental treatments.

Ocular melanoma, or eye cancer, is a serious disease that affects about 2,000 Americans each year. Roughly half of patients will die from the cancer because their tumor spreads to other areas of the body. Now, a new test can tell patients if they’re looking at life … or death.
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ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 200 — Stemagen, a privately held embryonic stem cell research company, announced January 17 it has become the first in the world to create, and meticulously document, a cloned human embryo using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

(1PN-SCNT) The first sign of successful cloning. The first indication that cloning has been successful is the observation of a single pronucleus, seen here, which contains the donated material from the donor skin cell. (Credit: Image courtesy of Stemagen)

Stemagen CEO Samuel H. Wood, M.D., Ph.D., a co-author of the publication and a donor of the cells from which the embryos were cloned, terms this achievement “a critical milestone in the development of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for human therapeutic use, potentially including developing treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.” Stemagen’s research is exhaustively detailed in a paper published in the January 17 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cells.

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Genome stitched together by hand | Scientists construct building blocks for artificial life.

Scientists have succeeded in stitching together an entire bacterial genome, creating in the lab the full set of instructions needed to make a living thing. The stage is now set for the creation of the first artificial organism — and it could be achieved within the year.

The genome for the pathogenic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium was made in the laboratory by Hamilton Smith and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. The genome has 582,970 of the fundamental building blocks of DNA, called nucleotide bases, making it more than a factor of ten longer than the previous-longest stretch of genetic material created by chemical means.

Now the team at the Venter institute, which includes the institute’s founder, genomics pioneer Craig Venter, will aim to discover whether cells can be ‘booted up’ into action when loaded with this genetic programme. “This is the next step and we are working on it,” says Smith.

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Scientists Engineer a Beating Heart

In a new study, published online January 13, 2008 in Nature Medicine, scientists showed that the dream of growing new human hearts to replace damaged ones is not simply in the realm of a too-distant future, as the group reported they were successful in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory [1]..

Using a process known as perfusion decellularization, the scientists, among them senior investigator Dr Doris Taylor (University of Minnesota, MN), created a functional scaffold of the rat heart and then, after injecting it with cardiac cells from other rats, were able to get the heart beating again.

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Transinsight’s GoPubMed with Social Networking Features for Biomedical Experts

GoPubMed gives an overview over search results by classifying them according to the GeneOntology, a hierarchical vocabulary for processes, functions, and cellular components.

With the advent of high-throughput technologies and the Internet, the life sciences have changed dramatically, producing ever-increasing amounts of data. Public databases currently host thousands of 3D protein structures, millions of sequences, and millions of scientific literature abstracts. Current technologies do not support the user in finding the right information for a task. We help you solve these problems!

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