Northwest Highlights

Gates Foundation Gives Grant for Global Health to Biotech Nonprofit

Diseases of the developing world beware. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded a $5.4-million grant to a nonprofit created by the biotechnology industry's chief advocacy group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) will use the funds from the four-year grant to encourage biotechnology companies to develop drugs for diseases which disproportionately affect the developing world. These diseases are often ignored by biotechnology companies due to uncertainties about the business environment in developing countries. BVGH will assess market opportunities for drugs designed to treat neglected diseases and provide incentives for companies to invest in smaller, less lucrative markets. Currently, less than 10 percent of health research funding goes toward diseases that cause 90 percent of the global health burden.

Genomic Information Can Be Processed In Minutes, Not Weeks

Identifying unknown organisms by comparing their genomes to databases of known sequences used to take a long time. However, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. have developed ScalaBLAST to speed things up. It's a faster version of a computational tool used to sequence unknown genomic material called the Basic Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST. "Because our databases are growing so rapidly, the searches done in the conventional way can take weeks," says T. P. Straatsma, a senior research scientist in computational biology and bioinformatics at PNNL. Instead of computing on just one processor, ScalaBLAST works by distributing information over many parallel processors. ScalaBLAST, so called because the speed of computation scales linearly with the number of processors, has been implemented on up to 1,500 processors to date. This research is part of a Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing project called BioPilot, which probes problems in biology involving very large amounts of data.

CellCyte Purchases Stem Cell Factory

Stem cells from the "cord blood" left in a placenta following birth are similar to those produced in bone marrow, which form the foundation of our blood and immune systems. Cord-blood stem cells are an important alternative to bone marrow transplants, but the placenta only contains enough to treat a child or small adult. CellCyte Genetics, a Kirkland, Wash.-based biotech firm, plans to address this shortfall by increasing the capability of its new cell-culturing device, called a bioreactor, which can already grow up to 10 billion cells. "No other technology can expand [the population of] cells like this discovery," says CellCyte CEO Gary Reys. Unlike a two-dimensional Petri dish, the bioreactor imitates natural growing conditions by allowing the cells to associate in three dimensions, forming tissues that emulate the body's own. CellCyte also plans to use the bioreactor to perform the first expansion of insulin-secreting cell populations to fight diabetes.

OSU Researchers Identify Hotspots of Marine Productivity

All marine habitats are not created equal, ecologists at Oregon State University have found. In a study with broad implications for marine reserve development, a team led by Heather Leslie showed that some coastal areas are significantly more productive than others, and at smaller scales than previously thought. Barnacle populations near Cape Perpetua off the Oregon coast produced five times as many offspring as populations from Cape Foulweather a few miles away. The hotspot is close to a nearshore ocean area with high planktonic productivity. Barnacles are an important component of intertidal ecosystems, says Leslie, and are the base of many marine food webs. That populations geographically close to one another could differ markedly in reproductive output is notable, given that scientists assumed ocean conditions were uniform across large scales. "We know now that some spots mean more than others," Leslie says, "and this could serve as a model for how to link patterns in biodiversity with ecosystem processes."

New Adhesive Uses Mussels to Create Environmentally Safer Alternative

An Oregon researcher has developed an eco-friendly adhesive to replace the urea-formaldehyde (UF) resins used in decorative wood composites. Formaldehyde has been identified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as carcinogenic to humans. The new adhesive replaces formaldehyde in favor of soy protein, but its adhesive properties are tied to the string-like proteins known as byssus that mussels use to adhere to rocks on the beach. The resilience of the byssus inspired Kaichang Li from Oregon State University to determine how they withstand the wet tumultuous ocean conditions. Once Li pinpointed the molecular groups responsible for the byssus' adhesive properties, he coupled them with soy protein to create an adhesive that is comparable to the UF resins in both price and performance. Today, the adhesives are being used in Columbia Forest Products' PureBond line, a series of decorative wood panels designed for interior use. Ongoing research is focused on creating an alternative for phenol-formaldehyde resins using fungus found in rotting trees.

Flour Power: Idaho Researchers Develop Healthier Varieties of Wheat

As the pressure mounts for the food industry to increase the nutritional benefits of their baked goods or perish in the low-carb craze, University of Idaho researchers are just steps away from introducing healthier hybrids of wheat. The researches are crossing modern high-yield varieties with newly created varieties that have high levels of an enzyme that boosts the availability of nutrients in wheat. "The phytic acid found in wheat bran sequesters phosphorus and minerals, making them unavailable to those eating a baked good," says UI researcher Mary Guttieri. They hope the new hybrids will result in more nutritious wheat flour leading to the production of more wholesome breads and pastries.

Clam Mutation Confers Resistance to Red Tide Toxins

Signs warning against eating shellfish from Puget Sound beaches indicate the presence of algae responsible for red tides. During these algal blooms, toxins produced by the algae accumulate in shellfish. Consuming enough of the potent nerve toxins that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) can result in respiratory paralysis and death in humans, and there is no antidote. While the toxins also incapacitate and kill shellfish, certain clams become resistant. A study published in Nature has revealed that a single mutation in the clam's sodium-ion channels, where the toxins bind, causes this resistance. Sodium-ion channels are molecular switches that generate the nerve impulse and are critical to neural and muscular activity. The mutation causes a thousand-fold decrease in the binding of PSP toxins to the sodium-ion channel, allowing the clam to accumulate more toxins and pose a greater risk to humans. The study's co-authors include William Catterall from the University of Washington pharmacology department and Vera Trainer from the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

The University of Victoria Opens New Center to Study the Efficacy of Science Education

Sheila, a high school junior, transfers yeast cells to sterile petri dishes for further testing at a local biotech firm. Will this real-life, real-science internship opportunity increase her science literacy and perhaps encourage her to pursue science as a career? This is the type of question the University of Victoria hopes to answer with the launch of the Pacific Centre for Scientific and Technological Literacy. Center director, Wolff-Michael Roth, says "the center will create a synergy of existing projects" that include classroom activities, outreach programs, and internship opportunities orchestrated by a research team. Included in the project is identification of effective teaching strategies already employed in institutions called Lighthouse Schools. The Canadian Federal Natural Science and Engineering Council has awarded the center a one-million dollar grant to support the team's goal of assessing the effectiveness of these programs in increasing science literacy, a subject that until recently has been under-studied in science education reform.