Life Sciences and Chemistry

American Society for Cell Biology Meeting, Washington, December 2001

Microscope captures mitochondria bopping to a beat.

An intricate mesh of tubes wiggle, worm-like across the screen. “They’re speeding,” says Tim Richardson proudly, watching mitochondria, the cell’s energy generators, zoom around the cell. His controversial microscopic method is shooting the cell’s innards as they’ve never been seen before.

Live cell imaging has revolutionised cell biology over th

American Society for Cell Biology Meeting, Washington, December 2001

Stem cells’ fates are a multiple choice.

A single stem cell from adult mouse muscle can form enough blood cells to save another animal’s life – and still switch back to making brawn, researchers announced at the Washington meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology this week.

Stem cells found in mashed up muscle can migrate into the bone marrow and make blood cells 1 . Muscle

Bacteria give skin cells their marching orders.

Bacteria that cause potentially lethal ’flesh-eating’ infections make their entrance by telling skin cells to step aside. The bugs hijack the body’s signal for skin cells to become mobile.

Group A streptococci (GAS) normally infect the surface lining of the throat. But occasionally they penetrate skin or the tissues lining the airways, invading deep into the body and causing life-threatening disease.

Finding out how s

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a receptor that plays a key role in restricting embryonic stem cells’ pluripotency, their ability to develop into virtually any of an adult animal’s cell types.
The work is the first demonstration of a mechanism by which pluripotency is lost in mammalian embryos, one that operates with nearly the precision of an on/off switch in mouse embryos.

With further study, the receptor, dubbed GCNF, could open the door to new ways of c

World’s smallest reptile is discovered in the Caribbean forest.

At just 16 mm from nose to tail, the Jaragua lizard is the world’s smallest. In fact, it’s the smallest vertebrate that can reproduce on dry land 1 .

The newly discovered lizard lives on Isla Beata, a small, forest-covered island in the Caribbean off the Dominican Republic. Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University, together with Richard Thomas of the

For more than 150 years, people around the world have made ample use of the explosive trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as TNT. Its use has had unintended consequences, however: the manufacture, storage and disposal of TNT—which ranks among the most toxic explosives employed by the military—have left large areas of land contaminated and polluted. So far, effective and affordable cleanup technologies have remained out of reach. But new research suggests that help may come from what might seem an unlike