We ran a similar gene synthesis story earlier; progress in this area is made in the UK, too. It'll open tons of research avenue, speeding the slow (and tedious) process of gene cloning, or gene modification (mutations, deletions, etc). Devices the size of a pager now have greater capabilities than computers that once occupied an entire room. Similar advances are being made in the emerging field of synthetic biology at the University of Houston, now allowing researchers to inexpensively program the chemical synthesis of entire genes on a single microchip. Xiaolian Gao, a professor in the department of biology and biochemistry at UH, works at the leading edge of this field. Her recent findings on how to mass produce multiple genes on a single chip are described in a paper titled “Accurate multiplex gene synthesis from programmable DNA microchips,” appearing in the current issue of Nature, the weekly scientific journal for biological and physical sciences research.

Finding out where gene-regulator proteins bind to DNA and identifying the genes they regulate just got a step easier thanks to a new technique developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The technique could greatly speed the process of unraveling the role these proteins play in turning on and off the genes that establish the very identity of cells — be they brain cells, liver, or blood — as well as what might go awry in certain conditions like cancer.

The Notch pathway is an important molecular signaling mechanism whose existence has been known, or at least hinted at, for nearly a century since the identification of a mutant strain of Drosophila fruit flies with “notched” wings in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s lab in 1910. Later studies revealed that the Notch gene encodes a receptor protein that extends through both sides of the cell membrane and which is capable of interacting with a ligand partner, such as the protein Delta, presented on the surface of a neighboring cell. This “juxtracrine” interaction causes the cleavage of an intracellular region of the Notch protein, loosing it into the cytoplasm and triggering the activation of transcription factors within the cell’s nucleus. In addition to its effects on wing structure in flies, Notch signaling is known to be important in a number of neural cell fate determination and developmental processes, and is conserved in species from human to roundworm. In all processes in which it participates, Notch signaling shows the ability to sense a small change in cell fate and amplify it, acting as a sort of contrast enhancement mechanism in cell fate determination.

Sometimes a potential target for a drug seems very promising on paper; things are often very different in reality. Its the case of telomerase inhibitors to treat cancer; they are supposed to strip the "immortal" (able to divide indefinitely) aspect of cancer cells. Yet, something in the cell seems to block their function, preventing them to inhibit completely the telomerase. What to do then? Scrap the project? Look for something else? Hell no! Look out for whats stopping the drug! Perseverance is sometimes worth it, as we can see. A new research study published in the January issue of Cancer Cell provides exciting new information about how to boost the effectiveness of a promising cancer treatment that targets telomeres in an attempt to interfere with the ability of a cancer cell to continuously divide.

Sequence analysis is nothing new under the sun; its probably one of the oldest, most used and most studied area of bioinformatics. Still, improvements are made on a constant basis. One of the lastest, published in BMC Bioinformatics, tackle the issue of non-collinear alignment. Most traditional sequence alignment programs are excellent to align orthologous sequences; however, for non-coding segments, such as promoters, the assumption of collinearity is often wrong, and it can lead to non-significant results. GATA, a new graphic alignment tool, adds post-processing steps to the widely used NCBI-BLASTN program in order to fix the issue. Best of all : its freely downloadable and the code is open source on Sourceforge.