It has taken three decades from the first report of microbial polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) dechlorination to identify even one of the enzymes responsible. By combining conventional techniques with their own ingenuity, the latest technologies, and a bit of luck, Wang et al., in PNAS, have identified not one, but three distinct enzymes that can reductively dechlorinate PCBs (1). This finding is...

Process optimization is one of the most important activities in todays competitive industries. the rather high cost of research and development has necessitated the development of experimental methods by which the factors affecting processes could be determined with minimum number of experiments. Over the last two decades, various types of experimental designs have been used. Among the differe...

Methylation of lysine 27 on histone H3 (H3K27me) by the Polycomb complex (PRC2) proteins is associated with gene silencing in many developmental processes. A cluster of recent papers (Agger et al., 2007; De Santa et al., 2007; Lan et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2007) identify the JmjC-domain proteins UTX and JMJD3 as H3K27-specific demethylases that remove this methyl mark, enabling the activation o...

Hyperspectral data offers a powerful tool for predicting soil heavy metal contamination due to its high spectral resolution and many continuous bands. However, band selection is the prerequisite to accurately invert and predict soil heavy metal concentration by hyperspectral data. In this paper, 181 soil samples were collected from the suburb of Nanjing City, and their reflectance spectra and s...