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Artistic rendering of the process of reverse-engineering a jellyfish. Illustrated clockwise from the top, a juvenile Aurelia sp. is analyzed on the exterior (brightfield image) and interior (green, F-actin muscle stain; red, α-tubulin neuron stain; blue, DAPI nuclear stain), and the results are translated to micropatterning of rat cardiomyocytes on silicone polymer. The animal/construct diameter is ~9 mm (p 792). Credit: Janna Nawroth
Tension between practitioners who believe autologous stem cells should be considered a service and the FDA, which considers some of them biologics, has come to a head in recent months. Laura DeFrancesco investigates.
A serial entrepreneur learns that the world's most exciting, groundbreaking technology is pointless if it is unable to address an urgent and relevant need.
The Prometheus decision could have dramatic and long-lasting effects on the protection of biotech-related inventions, especially in the areas of diagnostics, biomarkers and personalized medicine.
Optical maps of a genome, which are generated by imaging labeled single molecules of DNA, facilitate structural variation analysis and sequence assembly. Lam et al. immobilize DNA molecules in nanoscale channels, increasing the accuracy and throughput of the mapping process.
RNA-Seq of single cells has been limited by biases in transcript coverage and unknown technical variability. Ramsköld et al. describe a protocol to reproducibly recover full-length transcripts and use it to quantitatively analyze splice isoforms in single cells.
Lippmann et al. present a protocol for differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into blood-brain barrier endothelial cells. The cells should be useful for studying this endothelial barrier, including screening for drugs that can cross from the blood to the brain.
Nawroth et al. combine rat cardiomyocytes and silicone polymer to make a jellyfish replica that mimics the propulsive behavior of its live counterpart. The design principles guiding this feat may facilitate tissue engineering of muscular organs.
Sequencing a genome and identifying genetic markers lays the groundwork for genome-wide association studies, but can be difficult to achieve for polyploid species. Harper et al. present an approach for performing association studies using genetic maps and markers generated from transcriptome sequencing data alone and apply it to the polyploid crop Brassica napus.