Superman-Strength Bacteria Produce 24-Karat Gold

"Microbial alchemy is what we're doing -- transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid, precious metal that's valuable," said Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics.

 A bioreactor uses a gold-loving bacteria to turn liquid gold into useable, 24-karat gold.

He and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, found the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride -- or liquid gold, a toxic chemical compound found in nature.

In fact, the bacteria are at least 25 times stronger than previously reported among scientists, the researchers determined in their art installation, "The Great Work of the Metal Lover," which uses a combination of biotechnology, art and alchemy to turn liquid gold into 24-karat gold. The artwork contains a portable laboratory made of 24-karat gold-plated hardware, a glass bioreactor and the bacteria, a combination that produces gold in front of an audience.

Brown and Kashefi fed the bacteria unprecedented amounts of gold chloride, mimicking the process they believe happens in nature. In about a week, the bacteria transformed the toxins and produced a gold nugget.

"The Great Work of the Metal Lover" uses a living system as a vehicle for artistic exploration, Brown said.

In addition, the artwork consists of a series of images made with a scanning electron microscope. Using ancient gold illumination techniques, Brown applied 24-karat gold leaf to regions of the prints where a bacterial gold deposit had been identified so that each print contains some of the gold produced in the bioreactor.

"This is neo-alchemy. Every part, every detail of the project is a cross between modern microbiology and alchemy," Brown said. "Science tries to explain the phenomenological world. As an artist, I'm trying to create a phenomenon. Art has the ability to push scientific inquiry."

It would be cost prohibitive to reproduce their experiment on a larger scale, he said. But the researchers' success in creating gold raises questions about greed, economy and environmental impact, focusing on the ethics related to science and the engineering of nature.

"The Great Work of the Metal Lover" was selected for exhibition and received an honorable mention at the cyber art competition, Prix Ars Electronica, in Austria, where it's on display until Oct. 7. Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important awards for creativity and pioneering spirit in the field of digital and hybrid media, Brown said.

"Art has the ability to probe and question the impact of science in the world, and 'The Great Work of the Metal Lover' speaks directly to the scientific preoccupation while trying to shape and bend biology to our will within the postbiological age," Brown said.

From sciencedaily

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Designing Tiny Molecules That Glow in Water to Shed Light On Biological Processes

Previous studies have used water-soluble particles to bring organic molecules into water. What is novel about this system is the use of a photoswitching mechanism in combination with these particles.

This image shows live cells incubated with the polymer nanoparticles. The green color is the fluorescence coming from the molecules trapped within the nanoparticles

The findings published online by Chemistry-A European Journal, describe the creation of a fluorescent photoswitchable system that is more efficient than current technologies, says Francisco Raymo, professor of chemistry at the UM College of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of this study.

"Finding a way to switch fluorescence inside cells is one of the main challenges in the development of fluorescent probes for bioimaging applications," Raymo says. "Our fluorescent switches can be operated in water efficiently, offering the opportunity to image biological samples with resolution at the nanometer level."

Fluorescent molecules are not water soluble; therefore Raymo and his team created their system by embedding fluorescent molecules in synthetic water-soluble nanoparticles called polymers that serve as transport vehicles into living cells. Once inside the cell, the fluorescence of the molecules trapped within the nanoparticles can be turned on and off under optical control.

"The polymers can preserve the properties of the fluorescent molecules and at the same time assist the transfer of the molecules into water," Raymo says. "It's a bit like having a fish in a bowl, so the fish can carry on with its activities in the bowl and the whole bowl can be transferred into a different environment."

The new system is faster and more stable than current methods. The fluorescent molecules glow when exposed simultaneously to ultraviolet and visible light and revert back to their original non-luminous state in less than 10 microseconds after the ultraviolet light is removed.

By using engineered synthetic molecules, the new system is able to overcome the natural wear down process that organic molecules are subject to when exposed to ultraviolet light.

"The system can be switched back and forth between the fluorescent and non-fluorescent states for hundreds of cycles, without sign of degradation," Raymo says.

The surface of the system can be customize to help it attach to specific molecules of interests, thus allowing researchers to visualize structures and activity within cells, in real time, with a resolution that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.

Raymo and his team will continue improving the properties of the molecules for future biomedical applications. The study is titled "Fast Fluorescence Switching within Hydrophilic Supramolecular Assemblies" Co-authors are Janet Cusido, Mutlu Battal, Erhan Deniz and Ibrahim Yildiz,Ph.D., students in the Department of Chemistry at UM; and Salvatore Sortino, associate professor of chemistry in the Department of Drug Sciences, University of Catania, Italy. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

From sciencedaily

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Blood test to spot cancer gets big boost from J&J

Boston scientists who invented the test and health care giant Johnson & Johnson will announce Monday that they are joining forces to bring it to market. Four big cancer centers also will start studies using the experimental test this year.

graphic shows how circulating tumor cells are captured for analysis

Stray cancer cells in the blood mean that a tumor has spread or is likely to, many doctors believe. A test that can capture such cells has the potential to transform care for many types of cancer, especially breast, prostate, colon and lung.

Initially, doctors want to use the test to try to predict what treatments would be best for each patient's tumor and find out quickly if they are working.

"This is like a liquid biopsy" that avoids painful tissue sampling and may give a better way to monitor patients than periodic imaging scans, said Dr. Daniel Haber, chief of Massachusetts General Hospital's cancer center and one of the test's inventors.

Ultimately, the test may offer a way to screen for cancer besides the mammograms, colonoscopies and other less-than-ideal methods used now.

"There's a lot of potential here, and that's why there's a lot of excitement," said Dr. Mark Kris, lung cancer chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He had no role in developing the test, but Sloan-Kettering is one of the sites that will study it this year.

Many people have their cancers diagnosed through needle biopsies. These often do not provide enough of a sample to determine what genes or pathways control a tumor's growth. Or the sample may no longer be available by the time the patient gets sent to a specialist to decide what treatment to prescribe.

Doctors typically give a drug or radiation treatment and then do a CT scan two months later to look for tumor shrinkage. Some patients only live long enough to try one or two treatments, so a test that can gauge success sooner, by looking at cancer cells in the blood, could give patients more options.

"If you could find out quickly, 'this drug is working, stay on it,' or 'this drug is not working, try something else,' that would be huge," Haber said.  

The only test on the market now to find tumor cells in blood - CellSearch, made by J&J's Veridex unit - just gives a cell count. It doesn't capture whole cells that doctors can analyze to choose treatments.

Interest in trying to collect these cells soared in 2007, after Haber and his colleagues published a study of Mass General's test. It is far more powerful than CellSearch and traps cells intact. It requires only a couple of teaspoons of blood and can be done repeatedly to monitor treatment or determine why a drug has stopped working and what to try next.

"That's what got the scientific community's interest," Kris said. Doctors can give a drug one day and sample blood the next day to see if the circulating tumor cells are gone, he explained.

The test uses a microchip that resembles a lab slide covered in 78,000 tiny posts, like bristles on a hairbrush. The posts are coated with antibodies that bind to tumor cells. When blood is forced across the chip, cells ping off the posts like balls in a pinball machine. The cancer cells stick, and stains make them glow so researchers can count and capture them for study.

The test can find one cancer cell in a billion or more healthy cells, said Mehmet Toner, a Harvard University bioengineer who helped design it. Researchers know this because they spiked blood samples with cancer cells and then searched for them with the chip.

Studies of the chip have been published in the journals Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. It is the most promising of several dozen that companies and universities are rushing to develop to capture circulating tumor cells, said Bob McCormack, technology chief for Veridex.

The agreement announced Monday will have Veridex and J&J's Ortho Biotech Oncology unit work to improve the microchip, including trying a cheaper plastic to make it practical for mass production. No price goal has been set, a company official said, but the current CellSearch test costs several hundred dollars.

The companies will start a research center at Mass General and will have rights to license the test from the hospital, which holds the patents.

In a separate effort, Mass General, Sloan-Kettering, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston will start using the test this year. They are one of the "dream teams" sharing a $15 million grant from the Stand Up to Cancer telethon, run by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Already, scientists have been surprised to find that more cancer patients harbor these stray cells than has been believed. In one study, the test was used on men thought to have cancer confined to the prostate, "but we found these cells in two-thirds of patients," Toner said.

This might mean that cancer cells enter the blood soon after a tumor starts, or that more cancers have already spread but are unseen by doctors.

Or it could mean something else entirely, because researchers have much to learn about these cells, said Dr. Minetta Liu, a breast cancer specialist at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. She led a session on them at the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and has been a paid speaker for Veridex. She hopes the cells will someday aid cancer screening.

"The dream is, a woman comes in for her mammogram and gets a tube of blood drawn," so doctors can look for cancer cells in her blood as well as tumors on the imaging exam, she said.

That's still far off, but Mass General's test already is letting doctors monitor patients without painful biopsies. Like Greg Vrettos, who suffered a collapsed lung from a biopsy in 2004, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

"It had spread to both lungs and they couldn't operate," said Vrettos, 63, a nonsmoker and retired electrical engineer from Durham, N.H. Tests from the biopsy showed that he was a good candidate for the drug Iressa, which he has taken ever since. He goes to Boston every three months for CT scans and the blood test.

"They could look at the number of cancer cells and see that it dropped over time. It corresponded with what the scans were showing," Vrettos said of doctors looking at his blood tests.

The test also showed when he had a setback last January and needed to have his treatment adjusted.

"I think it's going to be revolutionary," he said of the test.

More information: Mass General: http://tinyurl.com/2e7tbuz

National Cancer Institute: http://tinyurl.com/28tbow5

and http://tinyurl.com/2557mw6

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
From physorg.com

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Power of genomics cracks soybean code

PARIS (AFP) – Scientists on Wednesday unveiled the genome of the soybean, saying it was an achievement that should deepen understanding of one of the world's most important crops, help to boost yields and defend the plant against pests.

The study, published by the British weekly science journal Nature, provides a springboard for research into soy's DNA structure and protein-making machinery, its authors said.

Eighteen organisations, most of them American, teamed up in a 15-year endeavour that yielded a draft of 85 percent of the soybean's 1.1 billion base pairs, the "rungs" in the double-helix ladder of DNA.

AFP/Nature – Scientists on Wednesday unveiled the genome of the soybean, saying it was an achievement that should

"Soybean and other legumes play a critical role in global food security and human health and are used in a wide range of products, from tofu, soy flour, meat substitutes and soy milk to soy oil-based printing ink and biodiesel," said Molly Jahn, deputy under secretary at the US Department of Agriculture.

"This new information about soybean's genetic makeup could lead to plants that produce more beans that contain more protein and oil, better adapt to adverse environmental conditions or are more resistant to diseases," she said in a press release.

More than 46,000 soy genes have been identified, including key genes involved in the transformation of water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and minerals into energy and proteins.

One early breakthrough is the discovery of a gene that appears to confer resistance to a disease called Asian soybean rust, which can devastate up to 80 percent of a harvest.

Another, more futuristic, benefit could be in a next-generation form of biodiesel.

More than 1,000 genes involved in lipid metabolism have been spotted, said one of the researchers, Gary Stacey of the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology at the University of Missouri.

"These genes and their associated pathways are the building blocks for soybean oil content and represent targets that can be modified to bolster output and lead to the increase of the use of soybean oil for biodiesel production."

Biotechnologists have already unravelled the genome of rice, corn and the grape vine among other staples.

From http://news.yahoo.com

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