Headlines from the Division of Biology

October 30, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech have shown that a highly specific intrabody (an antibody fragment that works against a target inside a cell) is capable of stalling the development of Huntington's disease in a variety of mouse models. "Gene therapy in these models successfully attenuated the symptoms of Huntington's disease and increased life span," notes Paul Patterson, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences.

September 29, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech have proposed a novel model that differs from a widely held hypothesis about the mechanisms by which developing animals pattern their tissues and structures. Cells in a developing animal require information about their position with respect to other cells so that they can adopt specific patterns of gene expression and function correctly. The most accepted paradigm is that this positional information comes in the form of chemical signals called morphogens; morphogens are differentially distributed across the developing field, with cells acquiring the information about their position relative to their neighbors by "measuring" and interpreting the local concentrations of the morphogen.

August 18, 2009 - A team of scientists from Caltech have pinpointed two groups of neurons in fruit fly brains that have the ability to sense and manipulate the fly's fat stores in much the same way as do neurons in the mammalian brain. The existence of this sort of control over fat deposition and metabolic rates makes the flies a potentially useful model for the study of human obesity, the researchers note. Their findings were published in the August 13 issue of the journal Neuron.

August 11, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech and their colleagues in 30 laboratories worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information—the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics. This visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that biological models are depicted more accurately, consistently, and in a more readily understandable way. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), was published in the August 8 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

July 29, 2009 - Using a combination of theoretical modeling, energy calculations, and field observations, researchers from Caltech have for the first time described a mechanism that explains how some of the ocean's tiniest swimming animals can have a huge impact on large-scale ocean mixing. Their findings are being published in the July 30 issue of the journal Nature.

"We've been studying swimming animals for quite some time," says John Dabiri, a Caltech assistant professor of aeronautics and bioengineering who, along with Caltech graduate student Kakani Katija, discovered the new mechanism. "The perspective we usually take is that of how the ocean—by its currents, temperature, and chemistry—is affecting the animals. But there have been increasing suggestions that the inverse is also important—how the animals themselves, via swimming, might impact the ocean environment."