Within the European Union, measures to safeguard our food are becoming increasingly stringent: any constituents hazardous to health are either prohibited or ­permitted only as a trace. For analytics, ensuring compliance and monitoring for all of the statutory provisions safeguarding our food is a hugely challenging task. While immunotests have now been deployed successfully in rapid testing for the last three decades, aptamers have demonstrated increasing...

The chemicals industry has been wedded to fossil resources for the ­past hundred and fifty years, but times are a-changing. As the price of ­oil ­increases inexorably and environmental impact rises on the policy and regulatory agenda, industry leaders are starting to exploit new, more ­sustainable feedstocks for the manufacture of fuel and chemicals. Squarely in the frame as potential feedstocks are the vast tonnages of ­biowastes produced each...

The massive growth of compound activity data provides opportunities and challenges for medicinal chemistry. Conventional approaches for the analysis of structure-­activity relationships (SARs) are not suitable for the exploration and exploitation of this unprecedented knowledge base. Recently, new computational methodologies have been introduced for large-scale SAR analysis that put emphasis on visualization to provide an intuitive access to complex...

In the center of molecular biology is one species of molecules: DNA. DNA molecules are amplified and introduced into organisms by transformation or transfection, separated, stained, examined under the microscope, manipulated, sequenced and so on. For all these techniques the initial step is to isolate DNA from the origin of interest - and there is an endless number of DNA sources: soil, water, even air, body fluids (e.g. blood, sperm, and saliva),...

Why are individuals different? Why do the same mutations in the genome have different effects on different individuals? Why does one twin get sick when another does not? How do sicknesses come about through the combination of different mutations? These are the questions which British scientist Dr Ben Lehner – ICREA Research Professor, EMBL-CRG ­Systems Biology Unit, at the Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG) in Barcelona – investigates in his...

The application of Fatty Acid-Binding Protein (FABP) as a plasma marker for the diagnosis of acute myo­cardial infarction was first suggested in 1988. Currently, FABP is proven to have added value for the diagnosis­ of patients presenting with chest pain suggestive of myocardial infarction, especially in the early hours after onset of symptoms. The routine application of FABP for this purpose not only will improve patient outcome but also markedly...