Volume 28 Issue 8, August 2010

The MAQC consortium's latest study suggests that human error in handling DNA microarray data analysis software could delay the technology's wider adoption in the clinic.

With monogenetic neurodevelopmental disorders similar to autism serving as starting points for several drug discovery programs, smaller biotechs are now joining big pharma in pursuing therapies to tackle this perplexing condition. Sarah Webb reports.

By focusing on an unmet medical need, providing a cost-efficient solution and reinvesting the resulting revenues into R&D and state-of-the-art manufacturing, Shantha Biotechnics was able to build one of India's first biotech successes.

Restrictive licensing practices on DNA patents are stymieing clinical access and research on genetic diagnostic testing. Diagnostic companies, university tech transfer offices and their respective associations need to pay more attention.

The public biotech sector sustained more losses in 2009, but the year ended on a positive note, and the industry has regained its footing.

The court narrowly ruled that business methods may be patent eligible, while striking down the primacy of its main test.

Transplantation of human hematopoietic stem cells engineered to lack the viral coreceptor CCR5 confers resistance to HIV infection in mice.

The MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) consortium has evaluated methods for making clinically useful predictions from large-scale gene expression data.

A new method generates genome-scale modified bacteria with unprecedented ease.

The recent identification of human CD141⁺ dendritic cells as a counterpart of mouse CD8⁺ dendritic cells may be useful in developing vaccines and immunotherapies.

Which of the possible combinations of epigenetic marks have biological significance is a major question in epigenetics. Analyzing data from human T-cells, Ernst and Kellis discover 51 distinct, recurring combinations of histone modifications that can be correlated with the functional annotations of the underlying DNA sequences.

The Microarray Quality Control consortium pitted 36 teams against each other to evaluate methods for creating genomic classifiers, computational tools for interpreting gene expression profiles. The performance of the classifiers on blinded validation data—and metadata on the analytic methods—reveal the challenges facing the field.

Holt et al. describe an anti-HIV strategy in which human hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells are modified with zinc-finger nucleases to knock out the viral co-receptor CCR5. Transplantation of these cells into mice confers resistance to HIV, as shown by higher human T-cell counts and lower viral loads compared with animals that received unmodified cells.

Polo et al. show that early-passage induced pluripotent stem cells retain an epigenetic memory of their cell type of origin. These epigenetic differences affect the cells’ differentiation potential and might be exploited to generate particular cell types of interest.

To identify genes affecting traits of interest in E. coli, Warner et al. describe a method to rapidly create and assay rationally mutated versions of every gene. The approach is applied to several traits, including tolerance to cellulosic hydrolysate, a biofuel precursor.

Recombinant glycoproteins produced in animal cell lines often bear the nonhuman sialic acid N-glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc). Ghaderi et al. show that two monoclonal antibodies in clinical use differ with respect to addition of Neu5Gc and propose that drug developers should consider the consequences of the Neu5Gc modification.

Efforts to study ubiquitination have been hampered by the large size of ubiquitin relative to other post-translational modifications. Xu et al. use a monoclonal antibody specific for the adduct left after proteolysis of ubiquitinated proteins to analyze the differential regulation of ubiquitination at distinct sites within the same proteins.