He said the die-off was not typical. ..."It's fairly uncommon, especially in these types of numbers and in such a confined area," he said. "I've never seen anything like this in 20 years here," he said. "There were dead mallards everywhere - in the water and on the banks. It was odd, they were in a very small area." (David Parrish, supervisor for the Magic Valley region of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.)

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"I've never seen anything like this in 20 years here," he said. "There were dead mallards everywhere - in the water and on the banks. It was odd; they were in a very small area." "Typically, you'd see this spread into other types of waterfowl as well," Parrish said.

1,800 Species of Microbial Organisms Found in Texas City Air

A new "bacterial census" using a novel microarray found surprising microbial biodiversity - including bioweapons-related pathogens - in the air above San Antonio and Austin, Texas. "We're surrounded by bacteria, and they are not necessarily friendly," says Gary Andersen, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. J. Craig Venter of Celera fame is sequencing the metagenome of the air above New York City; he says microbial genetics is complex - and Andersen may be underestimating the microbial diversity in Texas air. "As weather patterns change, different things go up into the air. We could be changing what's in the air, and unless we know what's in the air now, we'll never know how it changes. It points to a real need for a microbial census," warns Ventner.

Four S. China middle school students suffer epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, one dies

Four students from Boyangzhen No. 1 Middle School in the city of Huazhou, South China's Guangdong Province, have been diagnosed to contract epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis and one died, said the provincial disease prevention and control center on Saturday.

The four students, all 13 years old, are classmates in the school.

They successively suffered headache, fever and vomit from Dec. 14 to 20 and were then confirmed to be infectious with epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, said Peng Guowen, an official with the center.

"As long as it used in accordance with the regulations, we have concluded it's safe," Zajac said. People normally come into contact with phages through food, water and the environment, and they are found in our digestive tracts, the FDA said.

Consumers won't be aware that meat and poultry products have been treated with the spray, Zajac added. The Department of Agriculture will regulate the actual use of the product.

In 2007, researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute sailed around the world aboard the Sorcerer II yacht and used metagenomic shotgun sequencing approaches to identify millions of previously unknown protein-coding genes. Then last year, Gilbert and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Edward DeLong each independently performed metatranscriptomic analyses to discover slews of new messenger RNA transcripts. Those studies also turned up many RNA sequences that could not be matched to any known protein-coding genes or ribosomal RNAs, indicating that many non-coding regulatory RNAs might literally be swimming through the seas.

Now, DeLong, his graduate student Yanmei Shi, and postdoc Gene Tyson have discovered that around 30% of all RNA transcripts in the North Pacific Ocean code for short, untranslated transcripts that match to the regions between genes in microbial genomes. The study "shows how many more potential small regulatory RNAs are out there," Gisela Storz, a small RNA expert at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, MD, who did not contribute to the research findings, told The Scientist. "The next part is the hard part, and that's to figure out what they're doing"

..........Researchers have used model laboratory microorganisms to show that small RNAs are involved in regulating important environmental processes including metabolism, quorum sensing, and photosynthesis. To determine whether the novel RNA transcripts were true regulatory small RNAs, DeLong's team looked for matches with known small RNAs, used self-clustering algorithms to group unknown transcripts based on sequence similarity, and compared the RNA folding patterns with known structural motifs. Working out these methods was "not a trivial problem," said DeLong, but "it's a very extensible type of approach." Now, others can use the same techniques to create "biosensors" of environmental perturbations. "Once we start to suss out the patterns [of small RNAs] we might have some pretty powerful markers," he said.

Big ocean, small RNAs

Originally posted by CultureD
reply to post by soficrow

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Sofi-
We have worked in government and nanotech labs (who use gold for DNA libraries, rapid test kits, etc.) I can personally attest to everything you have quoted.

Good lord- we worked on splicing resistant staph into E. coli as undergrads. Check out what the Promega company does. E. coli is ised for genetic engineering because we KNOW the genome and can use it as a factory to make anything we please- at our peril.

We're playing with fire as molecular biologists and it's going to bite us right in the bum, as we have no idea the power of life forms of all varieties to mutate- look at tobacco mosaic virus!

Rhabdo is also caused by the statin group of drugs, which claim to lower cholesterol, but in fact, lower life span. They block the biosynthetic pathway of cholesterol, while simultaneously blocking hormone, steroid, coQ10 and other critical molecules. One of the side effects is myocardio rhabdo- is anyone asking WHY? Because Merck and Pfizer make about 80B a year on the garbage.