The blueprint of a small organism’s cellular machinery has been unveiled, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the molecular essentials of life. But the research also shows just how far biologists have to go before they understand the complete biochemical basis of even the simplest of creatures.
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Grabbing one of the three laptops in her office at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, Jasmin Fisher flips open the lid and starts to describe how she and her collaborators used an approach from computer science to make a discovery in molecular biology. Fisher glances across her desk to where her collaborator, Nir Piterman of Imperial College London, is watching restlessly. “I know you could do this faster,” she says to Piterman, who is also her husband. “But you are a computer scientist and I am a biologist and we must be patient.”
This past July, the European Commission released estimates that if generic drugs were to enter markets immediately after patents expire—instead of the present average of seven months later—EU patients and national health services might save €3 billion ($4.5 billion) annually. But regulators acknowledge that costly and time-consuming patent disputes, and possible anticompetitive practices in the pharmaceutical industry, mean that such savings remain elusive. Continue reading Sluggish generics entry prompts calls for European patent reform
Growing numbers of farmed salmon in northern Europe are escaping and mingling with their tastier, sturdier cousins from the wild. Tracking this phenomenon is difficult because the two populations look alike.
But chemical signatures in fish scales may reveal a fish’s origin, British salmon sleuths write in the Marine Ecology Progress Series. Fish scales accumulate tree-ring–like layers that reflect a fish’s diet and the waters it has inhabited over the course of its lifetime. Pellet fish food contains slightly higher levels of manganese than is found in the diet of a wild fish. Clive Trueman of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and Elizabeth Adey of the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, both in the United Kingdom, used a mass spectrometer to measure manganese levels in the scales of salmon from several Scottish farms and from the wild. They found that they “could easily distinguish between time a fish had spent at sea and in fresh water,” Trueman says. By comparing the scale chemistry—cheaper than DNA analysis—ecologists can track the presence of intruders, the authors say, and determine where countermeasures are needed.
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