NIAB has patent protection pending for a number of schemes for encoding non-genetic information into DNA. The patent describes four methods by which DNA can be made to hold information in a binary or other number base format as a DNA ’barcode’.
Jonathan White, Head of NIAB’s Molecular and Genotyping Group said, “The encoding of non-genetic information has the overall major benefit of providing a means of ready identification and authentication of goods and organisms and is particul

Educators and scientists should discard the idea that a cell’s nucleus is just a bag of chromosomes, according to Johns Hopkins’ cell biologist Kathy Wilson, Ph.D. In a Feb. 17 session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Denver, Wilson and five others will introduce visual evidence of the nucleus’s newly recognized importance.

“The old view is that the nucleus is simply a warehouse for chromosomes,” says Wilson, associate

New molecular technologies, some driven by the work of a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are exposing unexpectedly high levels of DNA folding and complex protein-rich assemblages within the nucleus of cells that he says “seriously challenge the textbook models.”

“What we are seeing suggests that there may be machinery, not yet identified, that controls the folding and the movements of enzymes that turn genes on and off,” said Andrew Belmont, a professor of cell

The U.S. Government is spending millions of dollars to research the feasibility of stuffing carbon dioxide into coal seams and fields of briny water deep beneath the Earth. But, a scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting argues that the government isn’t thinking big enough in its plans to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Dissatisfied with the long-term potential of most current technologies for carbon sequestration, Klaus Lack

Researchers from Imperial College London, University of Oxford, Kagoshima University (Japan) and University of the Ryukyus (Japan) have discovered the mechanism by which human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1), the virus which causes adult T-cell leukaemia, spreads through the body.

Previously it was not understood how HTLV-1 was able to spread between cells and pass between individuals, but according to research published today in Science, the virus spreads by subverting normal T-cell (a

A research letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggests that the pain-killer ibuprofen could diminish the well-known beneficial effects of aspirin on preventing cardiovascular disease. Aspirin makes platelets (blood-clotting cells) less ’sticky’ which is associated with fewer thromboses (clots). Aspirin therefore reduces the chance of heart attacks caused by coronary thrombosis and stroke (cerebral thrombosis). Previous laboratory research has suggested that ibuprofen in