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Disease Markers That Will Aid Arthritis Research
A combination of biochemical and MRI markers will allow improved measurement of osteoarthritis (OA) progression. The biomarkers, described in BioMed Central"s open access journal Arthritis Research and Therapy, will be useful for the design and interpretation of trials of new disease modifying drugs.

Merseyside Nurse Jailed For 9 Months For Fraud
A nurse has been sentenced to 9 months" imprisonment at Liverpool Crown Court (15th June, 2009) for obtaining an NHS bursary and then employment in a private nursing home using forged documents, after overstaying his leave to remain in the UK. The conviction follows an investigation by NHS Counter Fraud.
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'Ballooning' Spiders Grounded By Infection
Money spiders infected with Rickettsia bacteria are less likely to "balloon" - that is, to use their silk as sails to catch gusts of wind and travel long distances. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology suggest that it may be in the bacteria"s interests to ground the spiders and that this reduction in dispersal could reduce gene flow and impact on reproductive isolation within the meta-population.
Sexual Health

P[acman]-Generated Fruit Fly Gene 'Library': A New Research Tool

Using a specially adapted tool called P[acman], a collaboration of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine has established a library of clones that cover most of the genome of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) and should speed the pace of genetic research. In a report in the current online issue of the journal Nature Methods, Dr. Hugo Bellen, a professor of molecular and human genetics at BCM and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and his colleagues describe the new libraries. P[acman] - developed by Dr. Koen Venken in Bellen"s laboratory - allows scientists to study large chunks of DNA in living flies. The vector - officially P/phiC31 artificial chromosome for manipulation - combines different technologies: a specially designed bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) that allows maintenance of large pieces of DNA in bacteria, recombineering that allows the manipulation of large pieces of DNA in bacteria, and the ability to insert the genomic DNA into the genome of the fly at a specific site using phiC31-mediated transgenesis. Venken adapted the P[acman] vector to create genomic libraries, so that a researcher can choose a gene and find the corresponding clones in the library that cover that gene. Their collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Drs. Roger Hoskins and Joseph Carlson, played a key role in the design, construction, and annotation of the libraries. "You can insert a single copy of a gene and rescue a mutation, or do a structure/function analysis of the gene," Bellen said. "If you don"t know where the gene is expressed, you can tag it, put it back and locate where it is expressed." The library is available at http://pacmanfly.org/. The report is available at http://www.nature.com/nmeth/index.html Others who took part in this work include Karen L. Schulze, Hongling Pan and Yuchun He of BCM, Ken Wan (LBNL), Rebecca Spokony and Kevin P. White of the University of Chicago, and Maxim Koriabine and Pieter J. de Jong of Children"s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California. Funding for this work came from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the BCM Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center. Glenna Picton Baylor College of Medicine


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