The University of Southern California is expanding yet again, thanks in part to a recent $10 million gift from USC Trustee Malcolm Currie and his wife, Barbara. The gift will help support the Keck School of Medicine of USC, as well as construction of the new USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.
Read MoreTags: CA, Bioresearch, University of Southern California, Biomedical expansion, Microscopy, California, USC, Medicine, School of Medicine, 2015, new construction, Southwest Region, new Building, New research center
By combining time-lapse luminescence microscopy with a microfluidic device, researchers at Duke University were able to track the dynamics of cell cycle genes in single yeast with subminute exposure times over many generations. Typically time-lapse fluorescence microscopy of genetically encoded fluorescent proteins is the gold standard for measuring in vivo dynamics of gene expression in single cells.
Read MoreTags: Duke University, North Carolina, Microscopy, East Coast, 2015, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Durham, Research, NC, Duke, gene expression, Yeast
Rutgers is now the only university in the world that's home to both a scanning transmission electron microscope and a helium ion microscope. The microscopes help researchers develop nanotechnology used to fight cancer, generate power, and create more powerful electronics. 
Tags: Microscopy, 2015, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Rutgers
Lab scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and UP's Center for Biologic Imaging have recently published an important paper in the Journal of Cell Science that sheds light on a novel method of interrupting mitosis in a cell by effectively depriving its mitochondria of a key protein. The resulting replication stress means cancer cells are stopped from successfully multiplying. Colorful images of the targeted cells actually show them stuck in anaphase trying to divide and subsequently tearing themselves apart. By identifying a compound that carries out this protein interference and disrupts normal mitochondrial fission, researchers have identified a promising therapeutic avenue for halting cancer growth.
Tags: 2014, 2013, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Northeast, Hillman Cancer Center, cancer research, cell biology, Microscopy, UPITT, Cell Research, BioResearch Product Faire Event, PA, NIH, Pittsburgh, Northeast Region
You might expect the barrage of brilliant lab-on-a-cell-phone inventions that come out of the Ozcan Nano/Bio Photonics Lab at the University of California Los Angeles to eventually dwindle, or perhaps only leave us moderately impressed after a while, but that's not the case. Less than three weeks into 2013, the Ozcan Research Group published on their development of a new optical microscopy platform which uses liquid nanolenses that self-assemble around tiny objects (in the sub–100-nanometer range), allowing it to detect viruses and nanoparticles. That paper was published online in the journal Nature Photonics and was the subject of a recent UCLA research news release. Also this month, the Royal Society of Chemistry published the paper Cost-effective and Rapid Blood Analysis on a Cell-phone. And the international society for optics and photonics, SPIE, announced a new annual award for 2013: the Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award. One guess who its first recipient is? Not a shabby way to start the new year at all.
Tags: 2014, CA, University of California Los Angeles, 2013, Photonics, Ozcan Nano/Bio Photonics Lab, Microscopy, Lab-on-a-chip Technology, Southwest, California, University of California, Los Angeles, LAVS, UCLA, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase
Tags: University of California Los Angeles, Medical Device Technology, Ozcan Nano/Bio Photonics Lab, crowdsourcing, Microscopy, Lab-on-a-chip Technology, Southwest, Los Angeles, UCLA, innovative solution, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase, BVS
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
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
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
