Beacons throw spotlight on mRNA two-step 6 November 2003 17:30 GMT by Henry Nicholls
The movement of mRNA within a cell has been visualized in real-time, claims a leading molecular
biologist, a technical achievement that could help resolve an ongoing debate on the nature of mRNA
transport.
"We have succeeded in not only imaging the distribution of native endogenous mRNA, we have also
tracked its transport to its site of localization," said Sanjay Tyagi, a molecular biologist at the
Public Health Research Institute in Newark, New Jersey. "This is the first time anybody has
visualized endogenous mRNA in a living cell and monitored its transport in real time," he told
BioMedNet News.
Back in 1998, Tyagi's team described a new way of labeling and tracking intracellular molecules.
Their so-called 'molecular beacons' would fluoresce only when they hybridized with their target. It
has taken until now to refine them so that they are resistant to nucleases and other enzymes.
Read the rest at BioMedNet gateways.bmn.comstoryOpen ↗
Small molecule phage display Commentary by Leodevico L Ilag 5 November 2003
Phage display has proven to be a robust and facile approach to select functional proteins from a
diverse pool of variants such as large combinatorial antibody and peptide libraries. This can be
attributed to the different unique properties of bacteriophage such as its efficient infection
mechanism leading to a very sensitive single molecule (infective phage) detection read-out and its
efficient signal amplification (replication). However, the method has been limited to the display of
molecules permuted from 20 different amino acids. On the other hand, selection of compounds from
small molecule combinatorial libraries has been limited by the amounts needed for screening to
permit detection in in vitro cell-based and in vivo screening because the beads used to couple small
molecules are relatively too large and not readily amplified for better detection. Extending the
advantages of phage display to combinatorial small molecule chemistry would revolutionize small
molecule discovery.
The inefficient clone Investigators: Ian Wilmut, Philippe Collas and Mellissa Mann 22 September 2003
by Laura Spinney
If you want to change a cell's identity, you can tinker with its external environment or you can
manipulate its insides. Researchers are homing in on genes that could pull a cell back to the
embryonic stage, thereby artificially expanding its plasticity and range of potential identities,but
for now, one British biologist believes the most promising approaches are external.
Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland - the brains behind Dolly the sheep -
points to one approach in particular, exemplified, he says, by the work of Philippe Collas at the
University of Oslo, Norway, and his American collaborators.
Collas and colleagues have shown that fibroblasts taken from human skin can be partially reprogramed
as immune cells simply by bathing them in an extract of T cells. The reprogramed skin cells express
T-cell-specific receptors, for instance. And when the same fibroblasts are exposed to extracts of a
neuronal precursor cell, they extend neurite-like projections.
Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.