Chips

Emory Eye Center Implants Its First Retinal Chips In Patients With Retinitis Pigmentosa

An expanded clinical trial conducted by Optobionics Corporation involving the implantation of a retina mircrochip has allowed Emory Eye Center and the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research & Development Center to implant the device in several patients. The patients all have retinitis pigmentosa with moderate-to-severe vision loss. Three centers in the United States have been chosen...

Chemical Engineer Kao Explores Antibiotic Synthesis With DNA Chips

Ask Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Camilla Kao to describe a bacterium, and she'll compare it to a factory capable of producing antibiotics, immunosuppressants and anti-cancer drugs that no chemist can synthesize. Bacteria normally produce antibiotics to inhibit other bacterial strains competing for resources. Pharmaceutical companies exploit this property to manufacture drugs, but t...

Fish and chips: A fast track to understanding blood development

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have identified for the first time a group of genes that impact the development and function of blood stem cells, a discovery that brings researchers a step closer to harnessing the power of stem cells for disease treatments. Every day, blood stem cells divide and differentiate to generate approximately 200 billion new blood cells in the bone marr...

Taking 'chips' to the next level of gene hunting

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins' High Throughput Biology Center have invented two new gene "chip" technologies that can be used to help identify otherwise elusive disease-causing mutations in the 97 percent of the genome long believed to be "junk." A variety of DNA microarray technology, one of the two new chips, called the TIP-chip (transposable element insertion point) can locate in the...

Gene chips forecast ecological impacts of climate change

Gretchen Hofmann, an associate professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will present a talk about the use of technologies in molecular biology to assess climate-change related impacts on marine invertebrates at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco on Sunday, Feb. 18. Her research centers on sea urchins...

Elucidation of the genome for diabetics with DNA chips

The genome of patients with type 2 diabetes (DT2) has been elucidated, for the first time, thanks to the use of new DNA chip technologies allowing 400,000 DNA mutations to be studied simultaneously. New genes conferring a predisposition to DT2 have been identified. They include the zinc transporter of pancreatic insulin-secreting cells (ZnT8), which is a potential target for treatment. This study...