Life Sciences and Chemistry

The Science Generation project which European research commissioner Philippe Busquin is presenting in Brussels today aims to make decision-makers, politicians and scientists, as well as the general public, better informed on action to be taken at the interface between life sciences and society. This project, receiving €1.44 million in EU funding, seeks to set up networks of scientists, students and journalists, extending into the regions, with colloquia and public opinion surveys and debates online

As film buffs queue to watch the new Spider-man movie, geography students from the University of Sussex have gone one better by discovering a new species of spider in the wild.

The second year undergraduates were taking part in a field course to the Seychelles, one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet. As part of this trip the students were responsible for helping to set insect traps in the Vallée de Mai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Praslin, the second-largest island in

Bacteria that reproduce inside aphids have not changed their genetic make-up for the last 50-70 million years. This makes the genomes of these bacteria the most stable of all organisms yet studied. This finding is presented by a team of scientists at Uppsala University, Sweden, in the latest issue of the scientific journal Science.

Under the leadership of Professor Siv Andersson, researchers Ivica Tama, Lisa Klasson, Björn Canbäck, Kristina Näslund, Ann-Sofie Eriksson, and Johan Sandström at

Scientists discover Spot 42 function in the galactose operon

Although the E. coli galactose operon is a staple of most biology textbooks, a new report in the July 1 issue of Genes & Development shows that our understanding of this common example of bacterial gene regulation is still evolving.
Dr. Poul Valentin-Hansen and colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark report that a small RNA, called Spot 42, functions by an antisense mechanism to differentially regulate gene exp

Researchers at MIT and Rice University have discovered that microRNAs, an emerging class of non-protein gene regulators thus far only identified in animals, also exist in plants. By extending the known phylogenetic range of miRNAs to plants, this work points to an ancient evolutionary origin for microRNAs. The report is published in the July 1 issue of the scientific journal Genes & Development.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) compose a class of short, noncoding RNAs, 20-24-nucleotides in length, that h

Artificial “Sugazyme” catalyzes synthesis of novel proteins with special features

University at Buffalo chemists have developed a remarkably simple and effective biotechnological method for synthesis of novel proteins using amino acids that do not occur in nature by using unique, programmable ribozymes (enzymes made of RNA, or ribonucleic acid) that they evolved in the lab.

The technology, described in the July issue of Nature Biotechnology, provides a potentially important