University of Northern Iowa
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 28th, 2008
Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use our icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected here for easy reference.
Research Blogging
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Posted in Human Genome on Feb 26th, 2008
A Columbia University Medical Center research team has discovered a new gene involved in determining hair texture in humans. The team’s genetic analysis demonstrated that mutations in a gene, known as P2RY5, cause hereditary “woolly hair” — hair that is coarse, dry, tightly curled and sparse.
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Posted in Conservation Biology on Feb 26th, 2008
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened today on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American [...]
Posted in Tissue Engineering on Feb 26th, 2008
Researchers have demonstrated that living human nerve cells can be engineered into a network that could one day be used for transplants to repair damaged to the nervous system.
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Posted in Plant Biotechnology on Feb 26th, 2008
Research highlight by Doron Lancet, Crown Human Genome Center, Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Living cells are typically asymmetric, having tens of thousands different biopolymers (proteins and polynucleotides), but merely <1000 types of small molecules, such as amino acids and lipids. An exception is certain plant cells that harbor members of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 25th, 2008
Lack of Trained Workers Threatens Massachusetts Biotechnology Industry A report on the state of the Massachusetts biotechnology industry suggests that global competition and shortages of trained workers might cause the state to loss its reputation as one of the world’s top life sciences cluster. The report points out that there simply [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 25th, 2008
A panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel [...]
Posted in Plant Biotechnology on Feb 25th, 2008
The pea is an important crop species but it is unsuited to the Agrobacterium-based genetic modification techniques that are commonly used to work with crops. Researchers have now discovered the first high-throughput forward and reverse genetics tool for the pea (Pisum sativum) and it could have major benefits for crop breeders around the world.
Researchers from [...]
Posted in Plant Biotechnology on Feb 25th, 2008
The United States is the world’s top corn grower, producing 44 percent of the global crop. In 2007, U.S. farmers produced a record 13.1 billion bushels of corn, an increase of nearly 25 percent over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 2007 production value of corn was estimated at more [...]
Posted in Synthetic Biology on Feb 23rd, 2008
The third part of the Edge series “Life: What a concept!†is now online. This one is a talk with Drew Endy, a bioengineer at MIT. Despite existing for 30 years, we still haven’t realized much of the promise of biotechnology and Endy believes this is because we haven’t invested enough in making [...]
