Two proteins that control potassium regulation in stem cells have been found in the embryonic brain of rats, according to researchers at Texas Tech University and the University of Wisconsin.

Understanding this potassium regulation and how these proteins work can help researchers develop better detection and treatment methods for diseases of nervous system and the heart, said Dean O. Smith, vice president for research at Texas Tech.

The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE.
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Modeling Surprise
Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events, says Eric Horvitz.

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A new information system records what pills do to the body.

A system that monitors pill taking and its effects is being engineered by a Silicon Valley startup. The technology consists of pills that report when they’ve been taken, and sensors that monitor the body’s responses.

The company behind the technology, Proteus Biomedical, of Redwood City, CA, calls its technology the Raisin system. George Savage, Proteus’s cofounder and a former ER physician, says that the company was motivated by the fact that so many medical problems stem from drug compliance problems. According to Savage, 40 percent of hospital readmissions for heart failure happen because patients fail to take their medications properly.
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Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

In December, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which calls for U.S. production of renewable fuels to reach 36 billion gallons a year–nearly five times current levels–by 2022. Of that total, cellulosic biofuels derived from sources such as agricultural waste, wood chips, and prairie grasses are supposed to account for 16 billion gallons. If the mandates are met, gasoline consumption should decline significantly, reducing both greenhouse-gas emissions and imports of foreign oil.
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XII National Meeting of Biology Students, Braga ’08 (ENEB)

Every year, in Portugal, a commission of biology students organizes the ENEB.
In this year, at 15-18 Mar, the 12th edition of National Meeting of Biology Students will occur in Braga at the University of Minho, Portugal.
This event promotes social and scientific interaction between all students and invited Professors/ Researchers from different universities of Portugal.
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In the past five years, Spanish companies and institutions have sharply increased their focus on biotechnology, and the results — in new companies, new products, and new research centers—represent an important contribution to the growing international field. This is the sixth in an eight-part series highlighting new technologies in Spain and is produced by Technology Review, Inc.’s custom-publishing division in partnership with the Trade Commission of Spain.

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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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Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one.

“Having two eyes allows us to have depth perception and two ears allows us to pinpoint a noise precisely,” says Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. “Sensing odors in stereo is equally important.”
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This test is designed to measure the quantitative expression level of 22 protein biomarkers in the serum that differentiate between breast cancer patients and control subjects. The level of the biomarkers from the patient’s serum sample is compared to the Power3 Medical Products’ patient database. Statistical analysis by linear discriminant function will analyze the biomarker levels of the patient sample and assign a probability score for the diagnosis of the patient sample. Probability score is ranged from 0.0 to 1.0. Results of the BC-SeraPro™ test should not be considered a stand alone diagnosis nor a guarantee.
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The Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a small (50 nm in size), enveloped, single-stranded, positive sense RNA virus in the family Flaviviridae. Although hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C have similar names (because they all cause liver inflammation), these are distinctly different viruses both genetically and clinically.

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Inner life of a Cell

How can it be possible? “Softly complex”