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Dairy farmers are rapidly adopting molecular profiling to accelerate the process of siring cows. But this seismic shift in breeding practices is raising new questions and translating more slowly to the beef industry. Stephen Strauss reports.
Mining information from genomes often begins by aligning the sequences to identify evolutionarily conserved regions. Chen et al. assess the performance of four commonly used multiple sequence alignment tools.
The development of fully defined culture conditions for human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) should enhance experimental reproducibility, reduce unwanted contaminants and facilitate scale-up production. Villa-Diaz et al. show that a substrate made of the synthetic polymer PMEDSAH supports long-term culture of hESCs.
Genetically engineered mouse models of cancer simulate the spontaneous development of tumors in their native tissue environment. Singh et al. establish their ability to predict the efficacy of different treatment regimens by comparing clinical trial results to equivalent experiments in mutated KRAS-driven mouse models of pancreatic and lung cancer.
Rissin et al. increase the sensitivity of sandwich ELISA by segregating beads bearing a single enzyme-labeled immunoconjugate into femtoliter-volume reaction chambers. As the small volume of each well permits detection of extremely low levels of fluorescence, protein abundance is determined by counting the number of fluorescent wells as a percentage of the number of wells containing beads.
The spread of influenza virus strains resistant to the current generation of anti-viral drugs makes the identification of new druggable targets and lead compounds of prime importance. Kao et al. show that the influenza A nucleoprotein can be targeted by a small molecule that protects mice from lethal viral challenges.
The development of fully defined culture conditions for human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) should enhance experimental reproducibility, reduce unwanted contaminants and facilitate scale-up production. Melkoumian et al. show that a substrate made of peptides derived from extracellular matrix proteins supports long-term culture of hESCs and differentiation to cardiomyocytes.
The development of fully defined culture conditions for human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) should enhance experimental reproducibility, reduce unwanted contaminants and facilitate scale-up production. Rodin et al. show that a substrate made of human recombinant laminin-511 supports long-term culture of hESCs and human induced pluripotent stem cells.
Genome-wide single-gene deletion libraries can be important tools for understanding the molecular workings of an organism, but have only been created for a single eukaryotic species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Now, Kim et al. present a second collection of deletion mutants that covers 98.4% of the genes of Schizosaccharomyces pombe, allowing a systematic comparison of gene essentiality and knockout phenotypes between two eukaryotic species.
