“BBC radio Cambridge 7.20am 21.10.10: Dr Matthew Freeman, MRC LMB Group Leader, welcomes the LMB funding decision outlined in the spending review” More…
BBC radio Cambridge 7.20am
Brain cartography: the fly mating dance neurons mapped
“How the bundles of neurons in the brain controls behaviour remains an ongoing mystery. Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), in Vienna, Austria, and the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB/MRC), Cambridge, United Kingdom, have mapped neurons of the fruit fly, Drosophila, that controls sexual behavior. “We literally untangled the mess of wires in the fly brain and laid the ground plans for investigating a complex behavior in a simple organism,” says Jai Yu, whose doctoral work is published in Current Biology. This article is no longer available from the source website.
Biography captures Sydney Brenner’s unflagging scientific curiosity and lively personality
“From helping to decipher the genetic code to establishing the worm C. elegans as a model organism, and from directing the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge to advising research institutes around the world, Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner has had a long and impressive career. Few scientists have achieved as much as Brenner in both research and administration of science, and he has done so while enjoying a well-deserved reputation for iconoclasm and irreverent wit. The new book Sydney Brenner: A Biography, written by Errol C. Friedberg and published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, documents Brenner’s game-changing discoveries in the field of molecular biology, all brightened by his entertaining personality.” More…
Life’s cold start
“The hot spot for life on early Earth may have been a very cold place. Tiny pockets and channels that form inside ice can contain and protect replicating molecules, researchers report September 21 in Nature Communications. The paper suggests that life could have sprung from icy slush covering a freshwater lake, rather than a broiling deep-sea hydrothermal vent or the “warm little pond” proposed by Charles Darwin. And perhaps the frigid, icy surfaces of other planets are not as barren as they appear, proposes the research team from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.” More…
Life on earth may have had an icy start
“Cracks in ice could have served as a safe environment — much like a cell — for the first life on Earth to replicate and evolve. A new study adds plausibility to the ‘RNA World’ hypothesis that argues life began with a single stranded molecule capable of self-replication. “I always thought that the idea of an RNA world was exciting, but that RNA was a perverse choice of primordial material because it was hard to imagine chemical conditions under which they could survive on the early earth,” said biologist Philipp Holliger of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom, who led a study in Nature Communications Sept. 21.” More…
Expanding the genetic code
“The best career advice Jason Chin ever received came from an organic chemistry professor, biological chemist John Sutherland, who joined Chin recently as a colleague at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, U.K. Chin, who was studying for a B.A. in chemistry at the University of Oxford, was fascinated with the idea that a set of principles could explain how the world is built up from its constituent elements.” More…