Category: Biotech/Pharma News

By Kevin E. Noonan — Growth is one of the defining properties of being biologically alive, and the biology of growth involves both cellular proliferation and differentiation from stem cells to one or a plurality of differentiated cells making up a bodily tissue.  Examples range from regeneration of an arm in starfish (and in the…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Ulrich (Uli) Laemmli, an illustrious professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, developer of SDS (sodium dodecyl sulfate)-polyacrylamide electrophoresis (PAGE) for separating proteins, and responsible for identifying the "scaffold" structure of human chromosomes, was fond of saying (when he was a professor at Princeton) that in biological research it was helpful…

By Kevin E. Noonan — The orange clownfish, Amphiprion percula, is an important denizen of many reef systems (and, thanks to Disney, Pixar, and Ellen Degeneris, one of the most famous fishes since the Billy Bass).  One of thirty species of anemonefishes in the family of damselfishes, the orange clownfish is found in northern Australia,…

By Kevin E. Noonan — The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has been the subject of a controlled breeding experiment in Russia, at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to select for genetic determinants associated with domestication (principally, friendliness towards human beings; see, Dugatkin and Trut, 2017, How to Tame…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Many people of a certain age will remember their first awareness of the koala coming from a television commercial in the 1960's for an Australian airline ("I hate Qantas").  Thereafter, of course, zoos, like the San Diego Zoo and National Zoo in Washington, D.C., developed breeding programs for these marsupials…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Hiram Bentley Glass and classical geneticists of the Twentieth Century elucidated some of the ways that genetics could inform regarding human populations and their history, using observations like genetic drift (famously, among the Amish) and the "founder effect."  The "genomics" revolution of the last thirty years has extended these observations,…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Perhaps somewhat ironically, a group of Chinese researchers* recently published a report on the genome of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), entitled "The genomic and functional landscapes of developmental plasticity in the American cockroach" in Nature Communications.  These researchers,** applying a variety of modern genomic analysis techniques, elucidated aspects of…

By Kevin E. Noonan – One of the characteristics of autumn is a harvest of vegetables in the squash family, including the ubiquitous pumpkin (equally famous for pumpkin pie and infamous for pumpkin spiced varieties of seemingly any food product).  Appropriately, a recent report in the scientific journal Molecular Plant disclosed the genetic relationship between two…

By Donald Zuhn — Last year, two biotech companies announced that they had received institutional review board (IRB) approval for a study focused on the clinical intervention of brain death in humans.  The study, entitled "Non-randomized, Open-labeled, Interventional, Single Group, Proof of Concept Study With Multi-modality Approach in Cases of Brain Death Due to Traumatic…

By David Puleo and Anthony D. Sabatelli — Antibiotic resistance is a major problem in the United States and is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be one of the largest threats to human health.  The top 12 bacterial threats classified by WHO are shown in Table 21.  Researchers are going so far…