Articles in 1999

The term proteome, coined in 1994 as a linguistic equivalent to the concept of genome, is used to describe the complete set of proteins that is expressed, and modified following expression, by the entire genome in the lifetime of a cell. It is also used in a less universal sense to describe the complement of proteins expressed by a cell at any one time.

[WASHINGON]

Gene therapy researchers using adenoviral vectors should apply stricter quality controls and more precise monitoring because of the ‘narrow window’ that separates their potential efficacy from toxicity, says a National Institutes of Health advisory panel.

[LONDON]

The UK government and the Wellcome Trust have announced the largest investment in British university science infrastructure for forty years.

In many snakes, males have longer tails than females, a characteristic that seems to have arisen early in evolution. From studies of mating red-sided gartersnakes in Manitoba, Canada, it seems that male tail length correlates with copulation success, but the selective force for longer tails remains a matter of surmise.

Studies of phenomena called hotspots and superswells, evident at Earth's surface, offer the best clues as to the dynamic state of the underlying mantle. Their essential features have for the first time been reproduced in laboratory simulations of mantle convection scaled to Earth-like conditions.

[PARIS]

A $100 million research effort by IBM to build a ‘petaflop’ computer 500 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputer is being hailed by biologists as likely to herald a paradigm shift in our understanding of cellular biology.

The study of lifespan in worms has mainly evolved around the dauer-formation-2 gene (daf-2), which, when mutated, results in a dramatic extension of lifespan. A similar extension has now been observed in worms mutated in a range of genes that also affect the shape and function of sensory neurons. These results imply that sensory neurons can exert a strong effect on lifespan, and this link is thought to involve an insulin-signalling pathway.

The tortuous path from skull measurements to theories of racial superiority.

Jan van Paradijs: high-energy astrophysicist who hunted big astronomical game.

Automated chip-based technologies for analysing thousands of proteins simultaneously, analogous to the cDNA chip-based technologies that have facilitated transcriptomics, could provide a leap forward for proteomics research, whose progress is limited by the cumbersome multi-step methods currently available.