Mark Your Calendar: Some NAS events

A couple of interesting-sounding items crossed our desk earlier from the National Academies. On 12 and 13 October, the NAS will host a two-day workshop on stem cell ethics, science, and policy; you can listen in on the meeting via a live Webcast. The meetings run from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EDT each day. Registration information can be found at http://dels.nas.edu/bls/stemcell.html; for Webcast information, go to http://webcast.nationalacademies.org/.

Over on the other coast -- at the Beckman Center in Irvine, California, from 15 to 17 October -- the NAS will hold a Sackler Colloquium on "Frontiers in Bioinformatics: Unsolved Problems and Challenges," with a particularly rich-sounding program. Registration materials, travel information, and more can be found here.

And finally, don't forget the Institute of Medicine's Genomics and Public Health conference (7 and 8 October, at the NAS Main Building in D.C.), about which we've posted before. Admission is free, but advance online registration is required.

New in Science: 1 October 2004

Just posted on www.sciencemag.org:

--From Vogeley et al.: The wavelength of light shining on the light-sensing pigment from a microbe shifts the ratio of two molecular forms, endowing it with color vision (in Science Express).

--From Armbrust et al.: Diatoms, key members of marine and freshwater ecosystems, have genes for the urea cycle, for using lipids as an energy source, and for synthesizing their ornate, silica-based cell walls (with related News story).

--From Li et al.: Polymers consisting of three chemically incompatible arms assemble in water to form small particles containing multiple compartments possibly useful in drug delivery.

--From Krasilnikov et al.: In two versions of a ribozyme from different organisms, quite different secondary and tertiary RNA structures stabilize a similar RNA core that interacts with the substrate (with related Perspective).

--From Saffarian et al.: The enzyme that degrades collagen polymers does so by rectifying Brownian forces into a propulsion mechanism; the enzyme cannot backtrack because the polymer behind has been destroyed.

--From Verma et al.: A new class of small-molecule anticancer drugs that interfere with protein degradation and halt cell division has been generated by using a chemical genetic screen (with related Perspective).

--From Newsome et al.: Vaccinia virus co-opts a host protein that initiates polymerization of actin, which then enhances the spread of the virus from cell to cell (with related Perspective).

--And, from the News Department: NIH proposes a ban on paid consulting, and a lawsuit seeks to ease trade embargo rules in scientific publishing.

Barcoding Life

ScienceNOW posts a story on papers in PLOS Biology and PNAS (link to come) that reports some proof of principle for "DNA barcoding" -- the use of sequence differences in a short stretch of mitochondrial DNA, called COI, to differentiate between species (birds in the case of the PLOS study, butterflies in the PNAS paper). In both cases, the researchers found not only that sequence differences in this stretch of DNA were significantly greater across known species boundaries than within species -- they also uncovered, through the technique, candidates for new, previously unknown species in the populations under study. You can get more information at this Rockefeller University site (which includes a downloadable PDF poster "Top Ten Reasons for Barcoding Life") and at the Web site of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, which is building a public database of DNA barcode data.