Tubes in Biological News

Caltech scientists create DNA tubes with programmable sizes for nanoscale manufacturing

PASADENA, Calif.--Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a simple process for mass producing molecular tubes of identical--and precisely programmable--circumferences. The technological feat may allow the use of the molecular tubes in a number of nanotechnolog...

'Nanodrop' test tubes created with a flip of a switch

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new device that creates nanodroplet test tubes for studying individual proteins under conditions that mimic the crowded confines of a living cell. By confining individual proteins in nanodroplets of water,...

Tiny tubes and rods show promise as catalysts, sunscreen

UPTON, NY - Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed new ways to make or modify nanorods and nanotubes of titanium oxide, a material used in a variety of industrial and medical applications. The methods and new titanium oxide materials may lead to...

Crib-side studies help struggling newborns go home without feeding tubes

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) A new strategy developed in the Neonatal and Infant Feeding Disorders Program at Nationwide Children's Hospital is helping premature infants and other newborns with severe swallowing difficulties learn to feed on their own. According to a study appearing in the February issue of ...

Carbon nanoparticles toxic to adult fruit flies but benign to young

...d adult Drosophila in a control test tube and test tubes containing four different types of carbon nanopart...nd multiwalled carbon nanotubes. Flies in the test tubes with no carbon nanoparticles, C60 and the multiwalled nanotubes climbed up the tubes with few or no difficulties. But the batches of fl...

Animal and plant communication at the ESA Annual Meeting

...s coauthor Katherine Bennett, a fifth grade teacher working under a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Teachers grant, placed painted tubes mimicking pitcher plants' natural color spectrum of redness into the plants' habitat. They found that red coloration didn't affect the number of ants...

Little-known protein found to be key player

...were disabled. The tests showed that cells with extra atlastin had an overdeveloped endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a system of interconnected membrane tubes and chambers that's critical for normal cell function. The tests also showed too little atlastin led to a fragmented ER. Flies with defective atlastin...

Music is the engine of new U-M lab-on-a-chip device

...nd their collaborators replaces these air hoses, valves and electrical connections with what are called resonance cavities. The resonance cavities are tubes of specific lengths that amplify particular musical notes. These cavities are connected on one end to channels in the microfluidic device, and on ...

When children have breathing problems

...the children were asked to blow into measuring devices first hard and then slowly. This provided a measurement of the extent to which their bronchial tubes were constricted and therefore limited in function. When all these measurements were concluded in La Plata at the end of 2006, thousands of pieces ...

American Chemical Society's Weekly Presspac -- June 17, 2009

...1-569-24-5128 Fax: 81-569-24-5028 Email: t-kondo@mizkan.co.jp ARTICLE #5 EMBARGOED FOR 9 A.M., EASTERN TIME, June 22, 2009 No more test tubes on four feet? EPA moves toward animal-free toxicity tests Chemical & Engineering News The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans t...

Crustacean shell with polyester creates mixed-fiber material for nerve repair

...cal applications. Mixing chitosan, found in the shells of crabs and shrimp, with an industrial polyester creates a promising new material for the tiny tubes that support repair of a severed nerve, and could serve other medical uses. The hybrid fiber combines the biologically favorable qualities of the natu...

Plant microbe shares features with drug-resistant pathogen

...chanisms to produce glue-like substances, or biofilms, which allow them to adhere to plant roots, in one case, and medical devices such as ventilation tubes and intravenous catheters, in the other. Such devices are a common source of exposure to opportunistic pathogens for hospital patients. Implicati...

Slicing chromosomes leads to new insights into cell division

...t to arise out of the interaction between protein motors on the arms of chromosomes that push against cells' microtubules. Microtubules are long, thin tubes that form a central component of the cytoskeleton and the mitotic spindle. They serve as intracellular structural supports and as railways along which...

Saved by junk DNA

...s to tune the activity of genes to match changing environments -a vital principle for survival in the endless evolutionary race. Evolution in test tubes To further test their theory, the researchers conducted a complex experiment aimed at mimicking biological evolution, using yeast cells as Darwinian...

Preventing ear infections in the future: Delivering vaccine through the skin

... Currently infections are managed with antibiotics; however, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms is of concern. Surgery to insert tubes through the tympanic membrane relieves painful symptoms, but the procedure is invasive and requires the child to be under general anesthesia. Thus, it...

ExcellGene and Khner achieved milestone in development of novel 250 Liter mammalian cell culture bioreactors

...ension cultures, while oxygenating cells through the head space. The cylindrical vessel contains a disposable, sterile bag with appropriate connection tubes for seeding, feeding, gas supply and harvesting of the culture. Compared to classical stirred tank bioreactors, OrbShake-bioreactors are much simpler ...

Sugar on bacteria surface serves as base for a web of resistance

...ms can attach are key to their success, meaning that in addition to thriving in congested lungs, they also grow on catheters, ventilators and tracheal tubes any medical device that enters the body. But preventing bacterial biofilm development has implications beyond medicine. Fortified by the moist en...

2009 ASPB Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship award announcement

...l analysis of two Arabidopsis AGC kinases during polarized growth of pollen tubes Working with Professor Sheila McCormick and Postdoctoral fellow Yan Zhang on the polarized growth of pollen tubes in Arabidopsis, has taught me the dedication necessary to continue in resea...

Wild bees can be effective pollinators

...r. Tuell. "There are also a number of commercially manufactured options that growers can use, such as foam blocks with pre-drilled holes and cardboard tubes made to a particular diameter to suit a particular species of interest. Drilling different sized holes in wood is another option. If a grower is inter...

Spun-sugar fibers spawn sweet technique for nerve repair

...r filaments to create a scaffold of tiny synthetic tubes that might serve as conduits to regenerate nerves ...in water, leaving behind bundles of hollow polymer tubes that mimic those found in nerves, said Riyi Shi, a...tural nerves, which are made of thousands of small tubes bundled together. These...

Vanderbilt scientists invent world's smallest periscopes

...track the 3D position of the centrosome the specialized region of a cell next to the nucleus that is the assembly point where the microscopic polymer tubes that serve as part of the cell's cytoskeleton are assembled before cell division and broken down afterwards. The mirrored pyramidal wells provide ...

NC State study finds genes important to sleep

...h of the 40 lines were homozygous, or exactly the same genetically, but the lines were completely different from one another, Mackay says. Small glass tubes containing one fruit fly and some food were placed in a machine that uses infrared sensors to monitor the minute-by-minute activity of the flies. If a...

Nanotube's 'tapestry' controls its growth

...rs found the highly touted nanomaterials grow like tiny molecular tapestries, woven from twisting, single-atom threads. Carbon nanotubes are hollow tubes of pure carbon that measure about one nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, in diameter. In molecular diagrams, they look like rolled-up sheets of c...

TECNALIA uses artificial vision to improve recycling of electronic scrap metal

...ectronic equipment requires manual tasks, making the process labour-intensive and very costly. For example, with television sets, only the cathode-ray tubes are dismantled while the rest is crushed up. With other equipment, only the larger parts made of aluminium, copper or iron are separated, while the re...

Ancient geologic escape hatches mistaken for tube worms

...a formation near Denver, Colorado, are actually 70 million-year-old escape hatches for methane. Tubeworms, or siboglinids, look like long lipstick tubes and have been observed in warm and cold environments on the ocean floor, as well as in whale carcasses and decomposing organic-rich cargoes in sunken ...

Microbot motors fit to swim human arteries

..., a quarter of a millimetre, wide. Methods of minimally invasive surgery, such as keyhole surgery and a range of operations that utilise catheters, tubes inserted into body cavities to allow surgical manoeuvrability, are preferred by surgeons and patients because of the damage avoided when contrasted ag...

Researchers make breakthrough in the production of double-walled carbon nanotubes

...bes are synthesized, the process also creates many of the single- and multi-walled variety. Given their small size, sorting the valuable double-walled tubes from the other types has posed a real challenge. In a paper published today in the online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology , two resea...

Miscarriage and infertility treatment increase pre-eclampsia risk

...reased risk, even though hormone stimulation is part of the procedure. Different causes of infertility (polycystic ovary syndrome, blocked Fallopian tubes etc.) can probably explain the difference in risk for pre-eclampsia. It is likely that factors in mothers that cause infertility may also give an incr...

Using the other guy's toolkit: Similarities of pumping blood, oil examined

...oals: using imaging to identify targets, navigate catheters and drills into those targets, maintain flow in pipelines and blood vessels, prevent these tubes from clogging, repair them when they break down and improve the pumps when the pressure fails." The presentations are designed to offer common la...

Superglue from the sea

... worm is an inch or so long, and an eighth-inch in diameter. But they build tubes several inches long, using sand grains and shell fragments. "They will ...will use any handy building material, using their natural adhesive to build tubes by gluing together tiny pieces of egg shell, glass beads, red sand, bone, z...

Caltech researchers get first 3-D glimpse of bacterial cell-wall architecture

...image the peptidoglycan structure in three dimensions, which allows for a virtual 3-D tour of the bacterial sacculus. "What we saw were long skinny tubes wrapping around the bag like the ribs of a person or a belt around the waist," says Jensen. "We also saw that the sacculus is just a single layer thic...

Compact research freezers to debut in space

...uttle and the International Space Station (ISS). Capable of minus 160 degrees Celsius, the small, portable freezers can hold laboratory trays, test tubes and various research containers used in biology, chemistry, physics, medicine and other space-based experiments, CBSE engineers said. The freezer d...

Caltech biologists spy on the secret inner life of a cell

...icles, including multivesicular bodies and other more tubular vesicles, looped around each other into an unexpected "tangled mess," often forming long tubes that then broke off into the small vesicles that carry antibodies through the cell. When those vesicles arrived at the blood-vessel side of the cell, ...

MSU scientists find new gene that helps plants beat the heat

...d cytosol, the fluid inside cells, play a role in how plants respond to heat. The endoplasmic reticulum, a membrane in the cell that consists of small tubes and sac-like structures, is mainly responsible for packaging and storing proteins in the cell. According to Christoph Benning, MSU professor of bio...

UNC study on properties of carbon nanotubes, water could have wide-ranging implications

...d to hydrophilic or 'water-liking'." The UNC team did this by making the tubes colder. Using nuclear magnetic resonance similar to the technology used in...s of carbon nanotubes take in water only reluctantly. However, when the tubes were cooled to 8 degrees, water easily went inside. Wu said this shows that...

New meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina had bird-like breathing system

...Aerosteon has air sacs in an unusual place. "They come around the edge of the body and go into belly ribs. It looks like the beast had a system of air tubes under its skin," he said. The team highlighted three explanations for the evolution of air sacs in dinosaurs in their paper: development of a more ...

Broad Institute awarded grant to develop chemical probes for human biology and disease

.... Before screens can be carried out, months of meticulous work are needed to lay the necessary scientific groundwork. Will chemicals be tested in test tubes or cells? How will the biological effects of small molecules be measured? At the Broad Institute, many of these questions can be addressed by leveragi...

Stent grafts: a better way to treat blunt trauma injuries

... radiology treatment does not interrupt the blood supply. By entering a branch of the aorta through a small incision in the groin and using long, thin tubes called catheters, interventional radiologists guide and deliver a stent graft (a tube composed of fabric supported by a metal mesh) through the blood ...

UT Knoxville professor finds unexpected key to flowering plants' diversity

...uming process. In flowering plants, though, pollen tubes are able to cover longer distances to the egg by e...iosperms' evolutionary family tree -- grew shorter tubes of pollen than those that went on to evolve into t... angiosperms, the older plants grew shorter pollen tubes and took longer to do so than more diverse modern ...

U of T discovers environmental factors linked to sex ratio of plants

...hat when females capture large amounts of pollen, female-determining pollen tubes out-compete male-determining pollen tubes to fertilize the single ovule in each flower. Barrett leads a world-ren...