University of Northern Iowa
Posted in Animal Biotechnology on Jan 20th, 2008
A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.
Pure Pedantry : FDA (finally) says that cloned [...]
Posted in Plant Biotechnology on Jan 20th, 2008
Botanists are marveling at the discovery of a towering palm tree on Madagascar that essentially flowers itself to death.The palm has a huge trunk that reaches a whopping 59 feet (18 meters) in height and is topped by fan leaves 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter. The tree is the most massive palm ever found [...]
Posted in Molecular Pharming on Jan 20th, 2008
They always told you to eat your carrots, to improve your eyesight. Well, a deficiency of vitamin A (found in carrots, and lots of other foods) causes eye disease in a lot of children. In areas where Maize (corn) is a significant staple, there can be a problem because maize varies a great deal in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 20th, 2008
A Blog Carnival Devoted to Genetics
Mendel’s Garden
Blogged with Flock
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 9th, 2008
In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.To some this may be troubling, but part of the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 8th, 2008
After months of work, the January issue of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, my first as managing editor, has just been published. Better yet, it’s available online for free. The links below will take you to the full text of each article:
Biotech Blog » Journal of Commercial Biotechnology - Free Issue!
Blogged with Flock
Posted in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Plant Biotechnology on Jan 3rd, 2008
Northerners sip it from steaming mugs, whereas Southerners prefer it super-sweet in ice-cold glasses. However it’s prepared, tea is a popular beverage in the United States. Now, scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are offering a new twist on this old favorite–with assistance from a surprising source.Hops are best known as ingredients in another [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 2nd, 2008
A paradigm shift is underway within the methodology of heterologous protein expression. Specifically, researchers are moving away from conventional techniques of cloning genes from cDNA libraries and moving toward the rational design and de novo synthesis of entire protein-coding sequences from pre-annealed oligonucleotides (Libertini and Di Donato, 1992; Gustafsson et al, 2004). It was the [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 2nd, 2008
Promoters control the expression of genes in response to one or more transcription factors (TFs). The architecture of a promoter is the arrangement and type of binding sites within it. To understand natural genetic circuits and to design promoters for synthetic biology, it is essential to understand the relationship between promoter function and architecture. We [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Jan 2nd, 2008
Life is evolving fast (at least in the first world) and the latest technological gadget becomes outdated even before we have learnt how to use it. In this respect, science is no exception. The new buzzword ‘Systems Biology’ entered the vocabulary of the scientific community only a few years ago. Now that every biologist is [...]