DELIVERING GENE THERAPY WITH A PILL
University of California-Davis chemist Michael Nantz is creating a better way to deliver gene therapy that does not use a modified virus. He engineers lipids -- oily molecules that can form a protective complex around DNA -- to do the same job as a virus. The lipids protect the DNA and help it get into the target cell. The approach eventually could make gene therapy treatments stable enough to take as a pill. When the lipid/DNA globule is taken up by a cell, it's moved to an acid-filled compartment called the endosome. A key step, Nantz said, is to engineer lipids that can get the DNA out of the endosome and into the cell nucleus where most of the genetic material resides.
ENDANGERED TURTLE LIST HIGHLIGHTS CRISIS
The Turtle Conservation Fund is out with a list of the World's Top 25 Most Endangered Turtles hoping to draw attention to a Global Action Plan to prevent further extinctions. Some 200 of the 300 tortoises and freshwater turtle species in the world are threatened. "Many of the critically endangered species are at great risk of going extinct within the next 20 years -- unless we take immediate action," said Kurt Buhlmann of Conservation International. In Indonesia the Sulawesi forest turtle is critically endangered after only being known to science for less than 10 years. Scientists say belief that soup and jelly made from the Chinese three-striped box turtle has cancer-curing properties has reduced populations to a few remnant colonies in northern Vietnam and China.
NEW WAY TO STUDY MAGNETIC PROPERTIES
The First Order Reversal Curve method of studying magnetic properties of rocks is getting a lot of attention from the magnetic recording industry. International scientists met with University of California-Davis researchers to look at using FORC -- a way to study million-year old rocks -- on modern hard drives and new kinds of materials made in the lab. Magnetic materials are made up of grains that act as tiny magnets. The size and orientation of these grains determines the magnetic properties of the material. Magnetic tapes and hard drives use those magnetic grains to store information. FORC subjects materials to a series of switching magnetic fields. How they respond gives information about the size, orientation and behavior of magnetic grains in the material. FORC could provide information about magnetic interactions between grains that would be useful for developing better hard drives and magnetic storage devices.
A NEW WAY TO DETECT LEAD
A new biosensor that works like a strip of litmus paper to detect lead has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The colorimetric sensor is based upon DNA-gold nanoparticle chemistry, and could be used for sensing a variety of environmental contaminants. The researchers formed the nanoparticles into aggregate clusters that have a characteristic blue color. In the presence of a specific metal ion, the catalytic DNA will break off individual gold nanoparticles, resulting in a dramatic color shift to red. The intensity of the color depends upon the initial concentration of contaminant metal ions.
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(EDITORS: For more information about GENE PILL and MAGNETIC PROBE, contact Andy Fell at (530) 752-4533 or e-mail [email protected]. For TURTLES, Pamela Moyer, (202) 912-1294 or [email protected], and for LEAD, James E. Kloeppel, (217) 244-1073 or [email protected].)
