LMB In The News

“Scientists say some viruses can turn cells into ‘viral hotels’ by exploiting tiny molecules derived from human DNA. The UK study [directed by Cancer Research UK and in collaboration with LMB] found that some viruses can boost microRNA activity to suppress the immune system’s reaction to them.” More…

“Researchers are taking advantage of new tools and techniques in imaging, sequencing, and proteomics to zoom in on what single cells are doing … Paul Dear at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology says that single-cell analysis is going to explode — and test the paradigm that all cells in a body have identical genomes. “I think we are going to see a lot more cell-cell variation,” he says. Right now, though, Dear is focusing on cancer as those individual cells have lots of genomic differences.” More…

“Does your body run like clockwork? As Week 7 fatigue sets in, Michael Hastings writes on what recent discoveries in genetics mean for our sleeping patterns … Dr Michael Hastings is a Cambridge neuroscientist, based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, specialising in the molecular neurobiology of circadian body clocks.” More…

“Seventy-eight microbiologists have been elected to Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Fellows of the Academy are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology… including Andrew A. Travers”.  This article is no longer available from the source website: American Academy for Microbiology [26 February] 2010

“Scientists have developed a new genetic language using a ribosome that can read instructions that are 4 base pairs long, enabling the construction of designer proteins containing a variety of unnatural elements, according to a study published online today (February 14) in Nature… synthetic biologist Jason Chin of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues decided to devise a system that could read codons that are 4 base pairs long. Such a system could “open the door to what will be [the] truly revolutionary possibility [of creating] genetically coded polymers comprised of up to 256 [unique] building blocks.” More…

“Etienne-Emile Baulieu’s research team (Inserm research unit 788 “Steroids, neuroprotection et neuroregeneration”), in collaboration with Michel Goedert (who originally characterised the Tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease in 1998) have just identified an interaction between the dysfunctional Tau protein and another protein, FKBP52. Using tools from biochemistry and molecular biology, the researchers established that there was a specific physical link between these two proteins in the brain. They demonstrated in vitro that the FKBP52 protein suppressed activity of the Tau protein, and hence prevented its role in the assembly of microtubules, known for their role in transporting nutrient and information-bearing molecules into the cell…” More…