ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Like oil and water, two water-based liquids can mingle without mixing in a new University of Michigan technology developed for biological experiments. The new "micropatterning" method is useful in gene expression studies, which essentially turn genes on or off in cells in order to help researchers understand the function of those genes.

COLUMBIA, Md., August 13, 2009 - Shimadzu Scientific Instruments introduces SeqLab(tm) de-novo sequencing software for use with the AXIMA(tm) line of MALDI mass spectrometers. The software uses a high-power de-novo sequencing engine, MS/MS and possible related MS/MS/MS data to help decipher peptide sequences.

A novel technique allows researchers to efficiently and precisely modify or introduce genes into the genomes of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, according to Whitehead scientists. The method uses proteins called zinc finger nucleases and is described in the August 13 issue of Nature Biotechnology. For years, scientists have easily swapped genes in and out of mouse ESC or iPS cell genomes, but have had a notoriously difficult time disrupting or inserting genes into their human equivalents.

DURHAM, N.C. Supplementing obese rats with the nutrient carnitine helps the animals to clear the extra sugar in their blood, something they had trouble doing on their own, researchers at Duke University Medical Center report. A team led by Deborah Muoio (Moo-ee-oo), Ph.D., of the Duke Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center, also performed tests on human muscle cells that showed supplementing with carnitine might help older people with prediabetes, diabetes, and other disorders that make glucose (sugar) metabolism difficult.

Yale University researchers have discovered how a protein within most cell membranes helps maintain normal cell size, a breakthrough in basic biology that has implications for a variety of diseases such as sickle cell anemia and disorders of the nervous system. Cell size is regulated by the balance of positively and negatively charged ions and other solutes in the fluid inside and outside cells, which in turn prevents water from moving across cell membranes and changing cell size. Changes in chemical composition of extracellular fluid can disrupt this balance, sometimes with damaging consequences to health.

Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Harvard University have thrown the lid off a new toolbox for building nanoscale structures out of DNA, with complex twisting and curving shapes. In the August 7 issue of the journal Science, they report a series of experiments in which they folded DNA, origami-like, into three dimensional objects including a beachball-shaped wireframe capsule just 50 nanometers in diameter.

Early relatives of spiders that lived around 300 million years ago are revealed in new three-dimensional models, in research published August 5 in the journal Biology Letters.

Researchers of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre  have demonstrated that hormones can also activate their receptors inside the cell. Until now, cell surface expression of hormone receptors was considered a necessity for their ability to transduce hormonal signals from the outside of the cell to the inside.

Scientists in Singapore, The Netherlands and France report that they have developed a novel immunization method that will induce fast and effective protection in humans against the life-threatening malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which infects 350 to 500 million people world-wide and kills over one million people each year.

Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) finds that assisted reproductive techniques alter the expression of genes that are important for metabolism and the transport of nutrients in the placenta of mice. The results underscore the need for greater understanding of the long-term effects of new assisted reproductive techniques in humans.