$130 million CRC for biomarker translation opened at La Trobe

GTG to enforce rights to BRCA patents

Celera formally separates from Applied Biosystems' owner for Invitrogen's $7b buy

Sonic Healthcare to acquire Swiss laboratory group

Safety receives TGA cert for pen needle aid

Put together a mixture of biologists, biochemists and physicists and you might get a lot of blank faces, particularly when hard-core physics is being discussed. However physics and biology have come together to solve one of science’s big issues – the structure of membrane proteins – through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coherent X-ray Science.

Deciphering vertebrate development, sorting out the roosters from the hens and taking on bird flu – dare we say, all in one fowl swoop – that is the job of CSIRO’s Dr Mark Tizard, who has created a new microRNA catalogue for the humble chook.

Rightly or wrongly, concerns over GM crops contaminating their non-GM kin have led to a stalemate in progress towards acceptance of GM crops and foods. We look at a new approach using gene silencing and gene imprinting.

US company Thermo Fisher Scientific has achieved a number of breakthroughs in RNAi technology in the last couple of years and says it has come up with another – a method for delivering siRNAs to all cells, even the tough ones.

Andrew French’s team at Stemagen in the US claims it has succeeded where all others have so far failed – producing the first cloned human embryo from an adult fibroblast using SCNT.

When it comes to growing cells in a lab, technique matters.