Free Republic

Vol. 330 no. 6011 pp. 1612-1613 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6011.1612 News IntroductionTen years ago, Karl Deisseroth was stuck. A psychiatrist and neuroscientist, he wanted to learn how different brain circuits affect behavior—and what went awry in the brains of his patients with schizophrenia and depression. But the tools of his trade were too crude: Electrodes inserted into the brain would stimulate too many cells in their vicinity. So in 2004, Deisseroth and his students invented a new tool. They inserted a gene for a light-activated algal protein into mice brains, where it entered nerve cells. By stimulating those cells with a laser,...

When the cystic fibrosis gene was found in 1989, therapy seemed around the corner. Two decades on, biologists still have a long way to go, finds Helen Pearson. During the day, Lap-Chee Tsui and Francis Collins were attending a gene-mapping workshop. At night they were scrutinizing the pages churning out of a fax machine they had set up in a dorm room. Their hunt for the cause of cystic fibrosis had reached a gene that looked from its sequence like it might have a role in transporting ions through cell membranes, a process that goes awry in those with the...

Scientists at Harvard University have developed a computer model that, for the first time, can fully map and predict how small proteins fold into three-dimensional, biologically active shapes. The work could help researchers better understand the abnormal protein aggregation underlying some devastating diseases, as well as how natural proteins evolved and how proteins recognize correct biochemical partners within living cells. The technique, which can track protein folding for some 10 microseconds -- about as long as some proteins take to assume their biologically stable configuration, and at least a thousand times longer than previous methods -- is described this week...