The smooth and efficient functioning of any system necessarily requires a mechanism for recognizing and removing components that have served their purpose and are no longer needed, in order to make way for ones that are. It's waste disposal, and at the cellular level it's the important activity of proteasomes that maintain cellular health by identifying and degrading proteins that have been targeted as obsolete or damaged. (To put this in perspective, consider that at any given moment a human cell typically contains about 100,000 different proteins.) This housekeeping function of proteasomes is critical to a broad range of vital biochemical processes, including transcription, DNA repair, and the immune defense system. Since the proteasome process was only first described in 2004 (by Nobel Prize-winning chemists), our understanding of its mechanics has been limited.
Tags: CA, cell biology, Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Southwest, 2012, Berkeley, BioResearch Product Faire Event, National Lab, UC Berkeley, UCBerk, scientific instruments
The NIH has funded a five-year, $21 million Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism grant to support a multi-site consortium led by Oregon Health & Science University researchers Kathleen A. Grant and Betsy Ferguson. The grant represents the second competitive renewal for the INIA consortium (founded in 2001), which is made up of 15 lead investigators from 10 institutions in the United States and Europe. OHSU's share of the current funding is $6.3M. Dr. Grant is the head of neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), where Dr. Ferguson is an associate scientist. The Division of Neuroscience at the ONPRC conducts research aimed at identifying and defining fundamental aspects of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying nervous system function.
Tags: Northeast, Oregon Health Sciences University, cell biology, women in science, Oregon, alcoholism research, Neuroscience, BioResearch Product Faire Event, OHSU, Portland, BRPF, life science partners
There is still no magic pill for the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight, but research into the cellular mechanism of fat production is turning up promising avenues for therapeutics that are closer than you might think. We mentioned "good brown fat" in a recent article on hormone research at Harvard. Scientists in the Diabetes Center and the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of California San Francisco, Parnassus Campus, are also looking at brown fat production as a treatment for obesity.
Tags: University of California San Francisco, cell biology, Diabetes, Southwest, California, San Francisco, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase, BVS
Dr. Carlos Bustamante came to the United States from Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1975. He studied and received his degree at the University of California Berkeley, where he worked with his mentor, Ignacio Tinoco, in Biophysics. He returned to UC Berkeley as a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology in 1998 and has continued his groundbreaking work on single-molecule manipulation studies as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator leading a vibrant lab group with branches in the QB3 Institute, Berkeley Lab (LBNL), and the Physics Department at UC Berkeley. Now Dr. Bustamante is being honored with the 2012 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, which is awarded each year to an outstanding foreign-born scientist working in the US. The honor is accompanied by $100,000 and a unique trophy (see right, courtesy of the Vilcek Foundation).
Tags: Bioscience research, University of California Berkeley, cell biology, Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Southwest, California, National Lab
"There has been a feeling in the field that exercise 'talks to' various tissues in the body, but the question has been, how?"
Tags: Northeast, Joslin Diabetes Center, cell biology, Massachusetts, Boston, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Imagine a machine not-unrelated to the inkjet printer on your desk being able to create living organs, tissue and joints for transplant. It’s called bioprinting, and while it’s not going to happen tomorrow, research at major labs across the country indicates it is definitely the future. One of those labs is run by Dr. Ibrahim Ozbolat at the University of Iowa, who teaches in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and does research with the Center for Computer-Aided Design's Biomanufacturing Laboratory. In an article published in the January 2012 issue of Mechanical Engineering Magazine (MEM) entitled “Printed Life,” Dr. Ozbolat’s research on microfluidic vessel-like containers to house the printed cells and the fascinating world of 3-D bioprinting are explored in depth. [Photo of Dr. Ozbolat courtesy of University of Iowa]
Tags: Midwest, Medical Device Technology, University of Iowa, Iowa, cell biology, bioprinting
Tags: University of California San Diego, Bioscience research, cell biology, Lab-on-a-chip Technology, Southwest, California
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Germany has a long and illustrious history in photo-optics and many of its young scientists come to the U.S., and specifically to the University of California, San Francisco, to do their doctoral and post-doc work involving microscopy. Such was the case of Dr. Jan Huisken, who developed mSPIM technology while working in the UCSF biochemistry lab of Dr. Didier Stainier as a post-doc from 2005-2009.
Tags: University of California San Francisco, Photonics, cell biology, Microscopy, California, industry news
What happens when you bring together a pathologist with a group of computer scientists specializing in quantitative light imaging? In the recent case of research colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), you get a very promising solution to the problem of analyzing large groups of red blood cells for abnormalities that may point to serious diseases such as sickle cell anemia and malaria.
Tags: Midwest, University of Illinois, Photonics, Urbana-Champaign, cell biology, 2012, UIUrbana, BioResearch Product Faire Event, IL, scientific sales, 2011