HHMI Bulletin | February 2007
Sugar and spice and X chromosome twice—that’s what girls are made of, despite the fact that this double dollop of X chromosomes can be deadly for females of any species.
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Sugar and spice and X chromosome twice—that’s what girls are made of, despite the fact that this double dollop of X chromosomes can be deadly for females of any species.
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Last year, the two inventors—both unemployed at the time—developed an elegant procedure out of an idea they had begun exploring together in the 1990s. Instead of having a muddle of fluorescently labeled proteins glowing at once, sloshing light waves everywhere, they found a way to turn on just a few molecules at a time. read in full issue (pdf)
Telomeres, the long chains of DNA letters capping the ends of chromosomes, seem like a Dr. Seuss creation. What they spell out, in the language of DNA, amounts to gibberish.
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Evolution may not always plod along at the, well, evolutionary pace we all learned about in school.
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You can learn a lot about a cell by the company it keeps. Horacio Frydman hopes to learn volumes about mysterious cells in the ovaries of fruit flies that harbor an unexpected guest, an intracellular bacterium called Wolbachia.
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Couch potatoes, take heart. That irrepressible urge to veg out might just be a matter of brain chemistry–at least, in hamsters. read in full issue (pdf)
Scientific discoveries sometimes emerge from the most unexpected places. HHMI Professor Graham C. Walker, for instance, never predicted that a classroom experiment with soil bacteria would uncover a missing link in the biochemical pathway for manufacturing vitamin B12.
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As you turn the pages of this Bulletin, motor neurons that project from your spinal cord are coordinating the precise actions of more than 50 muscles in each of your arms. Each muscle is individually controlled by its own motor neuron cluster, which has a distinct identity and pattern of connectivity. read in full issue (pdf)
Using robots and other high-throughput technologies, the researchers screened more than 32,000 protein combinations, identifying 2,846 unique pairwise interactions in their study. Even so, says Fields, “We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s out there.” read in full issue (pdf)
If the thought of invasive medical procedures makes you queasy, HHMI investigator Owen N. Witte points out that “there’s a noninvasive trend in medical diagnosis—to measure things inside the body without having to stick tubes in a patient or do an operation.” Witte, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has recently furthered this trend, leading a team from three medical institutions to develop a noninvasive technique based on positron emission tomography (PET). The scientists captured three-dimensional views of one body component never before seen from the outside—the immune system.
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