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BU
start-up Modular Genetics, Monsanto partner
to modify crops
Excerpted
from 25 March 2005 BU Bridge
By
Tim Stoddard
A
small biotechnology company founded by BU faculty
and nurtured by the Office of Technology Development
(OTD) will soon be thriving across the river
in Cambridge, where it will help agricultural
giant Monsanto Company develop new crops. Modular
Genetics, Inc., is in the gene-building business,
pioneering new ways of manipulating DNA to create
novel genes, the blueprints that living organisms
use to build proteins. Monsanto has signed a
three-year license to use the company's patented
technologies to genetically engineer new crops
with enhanced traits.
READ
ARTICLE.
NSF
LAUNCHES EPIC COLLABORATION
The
National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced
the formation of a new collaboration, supported
through the Computer and Information Science
and Engineering Directorate, to construct a
human capacity-building infrastructure that
extends the cyberinfrastructure community to
include a much larger number of talented and
diverse people. The collaboration, Engaging
People in Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC), includes
K-12 teachers, university researchers, leaders
of organizations focused on diversity, and tool
builders from across the country focused on
interlinked and coordinated projects that will
significantly increase the diversity and number
of people that are learning about and applying
cyberinfrastructure to address their research
and educational needs.
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ARTICLE
FINE
TUNING
BU
Press Release - Joan Schwartz
Animals
and humans alike have an uncanny ability to
pinpoint the source of a sound. This capacity
depends on the ability of auditory neurons in
the brain to compute the differences between
the time it takes for a sound to reach each
ear - measurements known as interaural time
differences (ITDs).
A theory known as the Jeffress model, first
proposed in 1948, explains how auditory neurons
process ITD information. It is still considered
reliable to explain how birds localize sound,
but recent research questions the ability of
the Jeffress model to comprehensively explain
how mammals localize sound. A group of researchers
at ENG's Center for Hearing Research has recently
proposed a new model of sound localization in
mammals. The team includes Steven Colburn,
a biomedical engineering professor and center
director, Yi Zhou (ENG '05),
a biomedical engineering Ph.D. candidate, and
Laurel Carney, a former member of the biomedical
engineering department, now at Syracuse University.
This
work was published in the March 23 issue of
the Journal of Neuroscience.
I,
BACTERIUM: HOW BUGS CAN BECOME ROBOTS: ENGINEERS
ARE TRYING TO PROGRAM CELLS LIKE TINY COMPUTERS
SO THEY CAN BE USED TO REPAIR TISSUES OR DETECT
TOXINS
These
abstract patterns are the result of efforts
to improve on four billion years of evolution
and turn bacteria into living robots.
Engineers
have programmed the innocuous bacteria that
inhabit the human gut to communicate with each
other and produce various motifs. The colourful
feat by the bacterium Escherichia coli is reported
by a team from Princeton University in New Jersey
in the latest issue of the journal Nature and
represents a milestone in an emerging field
known as "synthetic biology"...
Meanwhile,
James Collins , Charles Cantor and
Timothy Gardner of Boston University
made a genetic switch, endowing each modified
bacterium with a rudimentary digital memory.
Using the switch, they have wired up bacteria
so that they get together to form communities
called biofilms under the glow of ultraviolet
light.
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ARTICLE
AN
ARRAY OF SOLUTIONS: FIBER ARRAYS CONTRIBUTE
TO STUDIES OF INDIVIDUAL CELLULAR BEHAVIOR AND
RESPONSE
By
David Walt (OE Magazine, MAy 2005)
Living
cells are usually studied by interrogating large
ensembles containing millions of cells, such
as in a cuvette or microtiter plate. Observing
entire cell populations provides only an average
response, which does not yield individual cell
variation and statistical distributions. To
collect single-cell data, we must view individual
cells under a microscope. This approach is limited
by the small number of cells in a typical microscope
field of view and the difficulty in tracking
individual cells because they float in solution
(with the exception of cells that adhere to
surfaces). My laboratory has developed a method
for observing thousands of individual cells
over time by placing individual cells in microwells
located on the end of an optical imaging fiber.
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ARTICLE
BRAIN
BREAKTHROUGH: researchers begin to crack the
memory code
Excerpted
from 15 April 2005 BU Bridge
By
Tim Stoddard
Joe
Tsien still vividly recalls the gut-wrenching
moment years ago when his elevator plummeted
five stories inside the Tower of Terror, an
amusement ride at Universal Studios in Orlando,
Fla. “You only need to experience that kind
of thing once and you'll remember it forever,”
he says.
Now
Tsien is beginning to understand how that frightening
moment was etched in his memory. With a team
of MED neuroscientists, Tsien, a MED professor
of pharmacology and director of the Center for
Systems Neurobiology, is shedding light on how
the brain forms memories of extraordinary physical
experiences such as roller coaster rides, earthquakes,
and car accidents. In a major breakthrough for
memory research, the team has come up with a
code-key for understanding how groups of neurons
in mice encode memories.
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ARTICLE
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