Big Role for a Tiny Genome

A Tiny Protein Plays a Big Role in DNA Repair

To use FRET for picking apart the pathways involved in phagocytosis, the researchers made mouse phagocytes that expressed engineered proteins— versions of ADP ribosylation factors (ARFs) 1 and 6 had fl uorescent protein attached, and fl uorescent marker proteins that would bind to either ARF1 or ARF6, when they had been activated inside the cell. Binding of the activated fl uorescent ARFs to th...

Tiny Medicine, Big World

Big lab on a tiny chip.

■ Ultimately, consumers could have labs-on-chips in their home for fast diagnosis of common illnesses. —The Editors Imagine shrinking the beakers, eyedroppers, chemicals and heaters of a chemistry lab onto a little microchip that could dangle from a key chain. A growing number of companies and universities are claiming to have devised such marvels, ready to perform vital analyses from detecting...

Thinking Big About Tiny Databases

Work on early tiny database systems, like TinyDB [17] and Cougar [23] has shown that a declarative approach can provide a powerful and easy to use interface for collecting data from static sensor networks. These early systems, however, have significant limitations; in particular, they are useful only for low-rate data collection applications on static sensor networks and they don’t integrate we...

Big Projects Targeting Tiny Pathogens