Week In Science

Tim Lambert posted an entertaining blog entry at Intelligently Sequenced titled Trp Attenuation: A Clever Way to Regulate. It described the regulation of the synthesis of tryptophan in prokaryotic organisms.

A Nature paper titled Human CtIP promotes DNA end resection by Alessandro A. Sartori, Claudia Lukas, Julia Coates, Martin Mistrik, Shuang Fu, Jiri Bartek, Richard Baer, Jiri Lukas and Stephen P. Jackson (Nature 450, 509-514 (22 November 2007); doi:10.1038/

A HUM-MOLGEN news item dated November 14, 2007 and titled, A New Virulence Mechanism For MRSA, refers to an article in Nature Medicine with information about strains of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

Chuck Colson's essay The Atheist Leap of Faith illustrates one of the ironies of the New Atheist movement. The attitudes and beliefs of Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss are the object of Colson's discerning scrutiny. Both men share a hostile view of religion although Dawkins is the more strident of the two.

The linked Biocompare article, One Man's Junk May Be A Genomic Treasure, cites the findings of researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine indicating that non-protein coding DNA may be rich in information and have the functional likeness of grammar punctuation. These "grammatical regions" could involve structuring the rules by which coding regions are expressed and regulated.

Sleep Strengthens Memories And Makes Them Resistant To Interfering Information is a Science Daily article discussing the relationship between sleep and memory and citing a related study reported in the July 12th issue of Current Biology by Jeffrey Ellenbogen and colleagues. Evidence was produced indicating that sleep improves the capacity to remember information. Intervening sleep between learning and testing led to enhanced memory of recently learned word pairs. The full article is linked.

William Dembski authored a blog entry at Telic Thoughts with the title MEDIA COVERAGE: Baylor, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Within it are links to other articles about the controversy.

A 'Nature' article (doi:10.1038/news070611-8) How a chill pains us by Heidi Ledford, identifies a protein in mice that signals pain in response to extreme cold. The protein, Nav1.8, was already known and had been linked to detection of tissue damage and pain resulting from damaged nerves.

The January 2007 issue of the journal 'Nanotechnology' reports on a new technology that enables the examination of individual molecules as a means of predicting gene expression. This in turn would lend itself to advances in the treatment of cancer and other medical problems. The nanotechnology company, Veeco Instruments, is involved.

An article in the current edition of Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology entitled 'P bodies: at the crossroads of post-transcriptional pathways' tells of P bodies and mRNAs. The transcription function has been known to be a focal point for the regulation of protein synthesis. As the article pointed out eukaryotic gene expression is regulated through control of transcription.