A team led by Bay Area scientists is one of five nationwide to receive a major grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to refine and standardize the technologies for identifying biomarkers in the blood -- specific proteins, and the patterns they make -- for the early detection of cancer.

In one of the most ambitious spinoffs of the human genome project, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Children's Hospital Boston, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and other collaborating centers have unveiled a new, systematic approach to drug discovery that matches diseases with potential treatments using a universal language based on cells' distinctive gene activity profiles, or "signatures."

Transfer of a gene that produces a mutant form of good cholesterol provides significantly better anti-plaque and anti-inflammation benefits than therapy using the "normal" HDL gene, according to a mouse study conducted by cardiology researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and reported in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

A research team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced today the development of a new kind of genetic "roadmap" that can connect human diseases with potential drugs to treat them, as well as predict how new drugs work in human cells. Called the "Connectivity Map," the new tool and its uses are described in the September 29 issue of Science and in separate publications in the September 28 immediate early edition of Cancer Cell. The three papers show the map's ability to accurately predict the molecular actions of novel therapeutic compounds and to suggest ways that existing drugs can be newly applied to treat diseases such as cancer. Based on the results, the papers propose a public project to expand this initial human Connectivity Map -- in the spirit of the Human Genome Project -- to accelerate the search for new drugs to treat disease.

What's the difference between a lifeless sack of chemicals and a living cell? It's all in the way they're organized, according to Stanford biophysical chemist Steven Boxer. With colleagues at Stanford, the University of California-Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he has developed a way to image cell membranes with unprecedented resolution-on the order of 100 nanometers, a scale larger than individual molecules but much smaller than entire cells. Understanding the chemical composition and organization of cell membranes-what components reside next to each other, how many of each there are and how they respond to their environment-may reveal the secret lives of cells in both health and disease. The researchers report their findings in the Sept. 29 issue of the journal Science.

Parasitic plants do not haphazardly flail about looking for a host but sense volatile chemicals produced by other plants and identify potential hosts by their emissions, according to a team of Penn State chemical ecologists.

Might some infectious diseases run in families because one inherits susceptibility to them? Although researchers generally agree that an individual's genetic makeup contributes in subtle ways to susceptibility to infectious disease, new findings from researchers in France support the controversial idea that an error in a single gene is enough to dramatically alter an individual's susceptibility to certain infections.

The life of a cell is all about growing and dividing at the right time. That is why the cell cycle is one of the most tightly regulated cellular processes. A control system with several layers adjusts when key components of the cell cycle machinery are produced, activated and degraded to make sure that the schedule is kept. These layers of control work differently and are usually studied separately, but researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have now discovered that they change in a highly coordinated fashion during evolution. The study, which will be published in this week's online issue of Nature, also reveals that although most components of the cell cycle have been conserved over one billion years, the temporal regulation of this process has evolved remarkably fast.

MORE than 40 per cent of fertility clinics in the US are allowing couples to choose the sex of their child, a survey conducted by the Genetics and Public Policy Center (GPPC) in Washington DC suggests. The testing method, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), was originally designed to test for severe or deadly diseases such as Tay-Sachs. It is typically performed by removing a cell from a three-day-old embryo, which is then screened for a range of chromosomal abnormalities or specific gene mutations. Seemingly healthy embryos are implanted in the womb; others are discarded or frozen. The survey, which covered 186 out of 415 fertility clinics in the US, found that around two-thirds of PGD procedures were performed to identify embryos at risk of birth defects or being miscarried.