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The University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Carnegie Institution of Washington have announced that they have entered into licensing agreements with Oxford BioMedica (LSE: OXB), a gene therapy company, that grants the company rights to key RNA interference (RNAi) patent rights. The technology was invented by Nobel-prize winning scientists Andrew Z. Fire, PhD, and [...]

Backed by a government intent on promoting innovation and fuelled by the “brain gain” of talented scientists and entrepreneurs returning from abroad, China’s health biotech industry only needs a more favourable investment climate to emerge as a global force in the production of therapies and medicines – both new and low-cost generics – experts say [...]

A team of biologists have developed a model mapping the control circuit governing a whole free living organism. This is an important milestone for the new field of systems biology and will allow the researchers to model how the organism adapts over time in response to its environment. This study marks the first time researchers [...]

Genome rearrangements, resulting in variations in the numbers of copies of genes, occur when the cellular process that copies DNA during cell division stalls and then switches to a different genetic “template,” said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears today in the journal Cell. The new mechanism is [...]

Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome the totality of all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Missouri-Kansas City teamed up to peel back another layer of transcriptional regulation and gain new insight [...]

When humans began to migrate out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, their skin color gradually changed to adapt to their new environments. And when the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, marine ancestors of ocean-dwelling stickleback fish experienced dramatic changes in skin coloring as they colonized newly formed lakes and streams. New [...]

Today researchers report new insights into how genetic variation may create phenotypic differences between individuals. This study, which investigates the influence of mutations associated with obesity on the mechanism of splicing, is published online in Genome Research . Many visible differences are apparent between individuals, ranging from height and weight to hair and eye color. [...]

For her pioneering work with telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, and their relation to cell aging and disease, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn was presented the prestigious L’OREAL -UNESCO For Women in Science Award. An expert in the area of telomere and telomerase research, Dr. Blackburn, Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology [...]

Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers, including Dr. Ariel Knafo of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes that this could very well be the case. Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers [...]

Version 2.4 of the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system, a resource provided to the scientific community for microbial genome data analysis, has now been released. Hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), IMG has built a popular following as reflected in the overwhelming response to IMG workshops offered [...]