Artificial 'Nose' Scouts
Bombs, Allergens, Wine

The job market for military working dogs is about to shrink: Scientists have created an artificial "nose" that sniffs out the explosive TNT with genetically engineered viruses. The eNose technology also has consumer applications, such as testing for allergens or helping foodies match a meal with the perfect wine. "We use the similar approach and materials that nature uses for smell sensing," said Seung-Wuk Lee, with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division. Full story.

A Quest to Create
Life Out of Synthetics

It is science so new that even Harvard does not yet offer a formal course in it, although some of the field's pioneering research has been done at the university as well as down the avenue at MIT. Sometimes called "genetic engineering on steroids," synthetic biology is a fuzzily-defined but fast-emerging science that some believe will transform genetic approaches to research in medicine, energy, ecology, agriculture, and more. On the medical front, Berkeley Lab Physical Biosciences Division Director Jay Keasling — armed with $42.6 million from the Gates Foundation — is closing in on a process for mass-producing inexpensive artemisinin, a potent antimalarial drug that now comes from wormwood shrub plantations. The new "factory" would assemble the drug from yeast, E. coli bacteria, and synthetic wormwood genes. Full story.

New Edition of Gray’s
Cancer Reference Work

Joe Gray of Life Sciences is among the authors of the third edition of the acclaimed reference work, The Molecular Basis of Cancer, which has just appeared from Elsevier Publishing/Saunders. The new, full-color edition incorporates cutting-edge advances and the latest research to explore the scientific understanding of malignant transformation and the pathogenesis and treatment of cancer. With the book comes a bonus "Expert Consult Edition" website enabling full-text search and all the book's images downloadable for personal use, plus periodic updates. More details are available here.

JGI Publications Now
Available for Download

From towering eucalyptus trees to subterranean fermenting fungi, the targets of interest for the Joint Genome Institute are colorfully summarized in the recently released 2007 JGI Progress Report. The report features the science-behind-the-sequence for scores of different organisms that are submitted to JGI from users around the globe with an interest in how genomics can inform groundbreaking research in bioenergy, carbon cycling and bioremediation. Also, the latest news from JGI, from the grand opening of its new building in Walnut Creek, to advances in applied ergonomics, can be found in the spring edition of the JGI newsletter, The Primer. To get hardcopies of both documents, send e-mail here.