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Affymetrix Unveils Plans to Double Plant and Animal Genome Microarray Offering

Sacramento - Today, Affymetrix, Inc.announced plans to make eight new GeneChip(R) plant and animal genomearrays available in 2005 as part of its Consortia Program, includingcanine, Rhesus macaque, Medicago trancatula (legume), Brassica, tomato,citrus, poplar and sugar cane. More than 20 research presentations atthis week's Plant and Animal Genome Conference XIII in San Diego,Calif. feature...

Study Demonstrates Gene Expression Microarrays are Comparable and Reproducible

Foreveryone doing or reading a paper about microarray-based experiments,reproductibility, especially inter-lab, is the #1 concern. Can I trustthese results? If I redo the same experiment in one month, will I beable to compare both? The NIH recently demonstrated that microarrays experiments performed in d...

Breakthrough Microarray-based Technology for the Study of Cancer

A new development in the analysis of cancerhas been announced by Agilent Technologies. The company has reported aninnovative method that enables the rapid advance of microarray-basedcomparative genomic studies in cancer. According to the reportpublished in the December 24, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of theNational Academy of Science (PNAS) in collaboration with the NationalHuman Genome R...

Weizmann Institute scientists develop a new approach for directing treatment to metastasized prostate cancer in the bones.

Few things about growing older are asinevitable and obvious as “going gray,?yet scientists have been unableto explain the precise cause of this usually unwelcome transformation.In a report posted today on the Web site of the journal Science,researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s HospitalBoston say they have found the cellular cause of graying hair whileinvestigating th...

Nanogen Issued Patent for Electronic Microarray With Memory

Nanogen, Inc. (Nasdaq: NGEN), developer of advanced diagnostic products, announced today that it was issued U.S. Patent No. 6,867,048, "Multiplexed Active Biologic Array" by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The '048 patent relates to a method of addressing one or more electrodes (or "test sites") across multiple rows and columns of a microarray. The patent also covers a method for storing th...

MSI releases 'moleculizer' - a new approach to simulation of intracellular biochemical networks

Dr. Roger Brent, President and Director of Research at the the release of a new approach to simulation of intracellularbiochemical networks in the January 2005 edition of NatureBiotechnology.The research article, entit...

An entropy-based gene selection method for cancer classification using microarray data

Accurate diagnosis of cancer subtypes remains a challenging problem. Building classifiers based on gene expression data is a promising approach; yet the selection of non-redundant but relevant genes is difficult. The selected gene set should be small enough to allow diagnosis even in regular clinical laboratories and ideally identify genes involved in cancer-specific regulatory pathways. Here an...

Discovery Could Lead To Novel Approaches In HIV Treatment

,the Canadian Network for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics, has announcedthe development of a new method to assess how well the thymus (an organlocated at the base of the neck) works and the discovery of afunctional abnormality of this organ in HIV-infected individuals. Theteam of investigators led by Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sékaly, professor atUniversi...

Genrate: a generative model that finds and scores new genes and exons in genomic microarray data

Abstract : Recently, researchers have made some progress in using microarrays to validate predicted exons in genome sequence and find new gene structures. However, current methods rely on separately making threshold-based decisions on intensity of expression, similarity of expression profiles, and arrangements of exons in the genome. We have taken a Bayesian approach and developed GenRate,...

New Insights Into HIV Immunity Suggest Alternative Approach to Vaccines

New insights by Duke University Medical Center researchers as to how HIV evades the human immune system may offer a new approach for developing HIV vaccines. The findings suggest some HIV vaccines may have failed because they induce a class of antibodies that a patient's own immune system is programmed to destroy. The Duke team discovered that certain broadly protective antibodies, which...

Stopping smallpox in its tracks: A new anti-viral approach

Natural or deliberate exposure to smallpox poses a great health threat, especially since routine smallpox vaccinations have been discontinued and no clinically approved treatment currently exists. In the February 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ellis Reinherz and colleagues from Harvard Medical School propose a new antiviral therapy ?a low molecular weight inhibitor of signaling...

New Drugs For Bad Bugs: UF Approach Could Bolster Antibiotic Arsenal

Call it a chemical crystal ball. A new approach to predict whether a drug in development is likely to work and which dose is best could get antibiotics to market faster and more cheaply, say University of Florida researchers. In recent years, scientists worldwide have sounded the alarm: There simply aren’t enough drugs to combat bad bugs. Bacteria are increasingly adept at outwitting the t...

Growth in biomass could put US on road to energy independence

Relief from soaring prices at the gas pump could come in the form of corncobs, cornstalks, switchgrass and other types of biomass, according to a joint feasibility study for the departments of Agriculture and Energy. The recently completed Oak Ridge National Laboratory report outlines a national strategy in which 1 billion dry tons of biomass ?any organic matter that is available on a rene...

Different microarray systems more alike than previously thought

A multicenter comparison of equipment that can analyze the expression of thousands of genes at once to create a genetic "fingerprint," suggests these different microarray technologies are more alike than once thought. Published in the May 2005 issue of Nature Methods, the study provides new hope that the mounds of information generated by these systems might actually be comparable, even t...

Agilent Technologies releases probe sequence, annotation information for all its commercial gene expression microarrays

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that it has for the first time released the chip design, probe sequence and annotation information for all of its microarrays. The release of this information is expected to improve cross-laboratory experimental research and cross-platform data comparison. "Full release of the probe sequences is an admirable and responsible position for A...

Road salt affects mitigation wetlands

Sacrificing one wetland for the sake of five others may be the way to go when planning constructed wetlands to replace those destroyed during road building, but a Penn State Erie biologist is monitoring the salinity of the wetlands to see how the salt affects animals and insects. "I am currently doing research in wetlands that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation constructed as mi...

Characterizing Skin Cancer by Microarrays

Microarray technology can be used to identify each stage of skin cancer tumor (melanoma) progression, according to a newly published report. Christopher Haqq and colleagues dissected a large primary melanoma into r...

Microarrays as phenotype

Microarrays provide a method of quantifying the expression and order of genes in a particular genome -- acting as a surrogate measure of cell physiology, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears online today in the journal Nature Genetics. "Microarray data are good phenotypes to determine the order of genes and are a good surrogate measure of cell status," sa...

Building a protein name dictionary from full text: a machine learning term extraction approach

The majority of information in the biological literature resides in full text articles, instead of abstracts. Yet, abstracts remain the focus of many publicly available literature data mining tools. Most literature mining tools rely on pre-existing lexicons of biological names, often extracted from curated gene or protein databases. This is a limitation, because such databases have low coverage o...

New book explains antibiotic resistance for a broad audience

Media coverage about "superbugs" that defy current treatments has increased the public's awareness of and fears surrounding the issue of antibiotic resistance. A new book from ASM Press, Revenge of the Microbes: How Bacterial Resistance is Undermining the Antibiotic Miracle, provides an in-depth overview of the subject in a reader-friendly, comprehensible style that will engage everyone from scie...

Agilent Technologies introduces advanced zebrafish, mouse microarrays for stem cell and developmental biology research

Which is more likely to happen - you being in a car wreck or being bitten by a shark? Those who answered that cars are greater killers win a free trip to the beach. It's really no contest, says a Texas A&M University professor. Your chances of being in a wreck are far greater than being a shark's lunch, says John McEachran, a professor of wildlife and fishery sciences who has studied...

Life detection instrument passes key test on road to Mars

The dry, dusty, treeless expanse of Chile's Atacama Desert is the most lifeless spot on the face of the Earth, and that's why Alison Skelley and Richard Mathies joined a team of NASA scientists there earlier this month. The University of California, Berkeley, scientists knew that if the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) they'd built could detect life in that crusty, arid land, then it would hav...

NCI Researchers Confirm the Effectiveness of Immunotherapy Approach to Treating Melanoma

A team of researchers, led by Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, have found that patients with advanced melanoma who had not responded to previous therapies experienced a significant reduction in the size of their cancers as a result of receiving a new immunotherapy. This immunotherapy consisted of a combination of chemotherapy...

$6.5 Million Grant for Microarray Center at Yale School of Medicine

In 1909, while harvesting a typical corn crop (Zea mays) in Illinois, a field worker noticed a plant so unusual that it was initially believed to be a new species. Its "peculiarly shaped ear" was "laid aside as a curiosity" and the specimen was designated Zea ramosa (from the Latin ramosus, "having many branches"). Due to the alteration of a single gene, later named ramosa1, both the ear and the...

Vaginal gel may provide a new approach to HIV prevention

Research with female monkeys at the Tulane National Primate Research Center has for the first time shown that three different anti-viral agents in a vaginal gel protect the animals against an HIV-like virus. The research suggests that a microbicide using compounds that inhibit the processes by which HIV attaches to and enters target cells could potentially provide a safe, effective and practical...

Agilent Technologies Introduces First Commercial Mouse Microarray for Comparative Genomic Hybridization Research

Tuberculosis remains a major global health threat. Although more than 3 billion doses of the BCG vaccine have been administered to fight tuberculosis, the ability of the BCG vaccine to protect adults is very limited, as is its efficacy against newly emerging isolates. In a study appearing online on August 18 in advance of print publication of the September 1 issue of the Journal of Clinica...

Rensselaer researchers develop approach that predicts protein separation behavior

Applying math and computers to the drug-discovery process, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a method to predict protein separation behavior directly from protein structure. This new multi-scale protein modeling approach may reduce the time it takes to bring pharmaceuticals to market and may have significant implications for an array of biotechnology applications, inc...

Proposal would allow wild animals to roam North America

If Cornell University researchers and their colleagues have their way, cheetahs, lions, elephants, camels and other large wild animals may soon roam parts of North America. "If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts," said Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell. "But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven...

Newfound roadblock to interferon effectiveness against malignant melanoma

Researchers have uncovered a significant contributing factor to interferon resistance of malignant melanoma cells. The finding represents a step forward in understanding the molecular events that govern the growth of this type of cancer and the changes in gene expression and cellular signaling that underlie resistance to established therapies. Malignant melanoma is the deadliest form of sk...

Huntington's cure in flies lays groundwork for broader treatment approaches

Boosting levels of two critical proteins that normally shut down during Huntington's disease, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have cured fruit flies of the genetic, neurodegenerative condition. The study results,...

Results of world's first gene therapy trial for arthritis show approach safe, feasible

Gene therapy for arthritis and other non-terminal, debilitating conditions and diseases is both feasible and safe, report researchers who conducted the world's first such test on the approach in patients with advanced rheumatoid arthritis. The results, published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that introducing a new gene has th...

Genomatix Microarray Analysis Pipeline achieves Affymetrix GeneChip compatible?status

Genomatix Software GmbH today announced that it has achieved GeneChip-compatible GeneChip® microarray platform and that it has joined Affymetrix GeneChip-compatible Applications Program, which provides customers with a broad spectrum of software solutions for biomedical research and development. As a GeneChip-compatible...

Fresh water affected by salt from deicing roads

Scientists have found that fresh water systems from across the northeastern United States including Baltimore, Maryland the Hudson River Valley, New York and the White Mountains of New Hampshire are becoming saltier due to deicer use on roads during the winter. Not only are there more roads, but the amount of deicing that occurs is increasing and gradually adding salt to fresh water systems repo...

Clinical trial to test stem cell approach for children with brain injury

A unique clinical trial will gauge the safety and potential of treating children suffering traumatic brain injury with stem cells derived from their own bone marrow starting early next year at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston and Memorial Hermann Children's Hospital. The clinical trial is the first to apply stem cells to treat traumatic brain injury. It does not involve...

Penicillin, amoxicillin: Step aside for strep throat treatment

Doctors today presented more evidence that it's time for long-time antibiotic stalwarts like penicillin and amoxicillin to step aside when it comes to the treatment of strep throat. The most common medications used to treat the strep germ, the bug that causes millions of sore throats in U.S. children every year, simply aren't doing the job and aren't as effective as newer antibiotics known...

Microarray technology for tailoring breast cancer therapy

Microarray technology could be used to tailor therapy according to the individual, and prevent breast cancer patients from having to undergo painful unsuccessful therapies. In a study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research, researchers analysed tumour tissue samples and identified a group of64 genes that can be used to predict a patient's response in the five years after adjuvant therapy...

The brain is broadly wired for reproduction

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have discovered a vast network of neurons in the brain of mice that governs reproduction and controls the effects of reproductive status on other brain functions. In their studies, the researchers found neural circuits that coordinate a complex interplay between neurons that control reproduction and brain areas that carry the neural signals trigg...

Children overprescribed antibiotics for sore throat

Physicians prescribe antibiotics for more than half of children with sore throat, exceeding the expected prevalence of strep throat, and used nonrecommended antibiotics for 27 percent of children who received an antibiotic prescription, according to a study in the November 9 issue of JAMA. Pharyngitis (inflammation of the throat) accounts for 6 percent of visits by children to family medic...

Carnegie Mellon U. transforms DNA microarrays with standard Internet communications tool

A standard Internet protocol that checks errors made during email transmissions has now inspired a revolutionary method to transform DNA microarray analysis, a common technology used to understand gene activation. The new method, which blends experiment and computation, strengthens DNA microarray analysis, according to its Carnegie Mellon University inventor, who is publishing his findings in the...

Study in Science holds promise for a new approach to drug therapy

Researchers believe they have found a way to change the action of 60 percent of currently available medications, in some cases making them many times more effective, according to an article published in the April 21 edition of the journal Science. The discovery has the potential to improve treatments for diseases including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression and arthritis. The study descr...