Within the past few years, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics have created new disciplines within biology while inspiring the creation of techniques and methods that take life science analytics to new levels of sensitivity, specificity and understanding.

Accessing the brain to unravel its structure and function is one of the greatest scientific challenges. This delicate structure consists of many regions—all made from many, many parts and even more connections—that communicate through chemical and electrical mechanisms.

Brownfield sites—mainly abandoned or soon-to-be abandoned industrial facilities—pose huge challenges to governments, communities, and engineering firms charged with restoring them to common uses. At issue are contaminants—chemicals and metals—that if not remediated pose public health concerns.

Combining chromosomes from different organisms started as soon as someone created a hybrid. “In natural breeding,” says geneticist Kulvinder S. Gill of Washington State University in Pullman, “we transfer genes through hybridization—transferring pollen from one plant to another.” He adds, “It can, for example, be pollen from wheat to rye or rye to wheat.”

Big data might bring more benefits to drug discovery than to any other field. For one thing, discovering a new drug turns out to be incredibly difficult. On average, a pharmaceutical company tries about 10,000 drug candidates for every one that ends up on the market. Plus, the process of discovering and developing a new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes more than a decade—some say more for both measurements.

Water testing laboratories hold a unique position among analytical facilities in their interaction with broadly diverse government and private entities

Sports is big business, which is why leagues and federations are desperate to keep their franchises honest. In the US, Major League Baseball (MLB) received a record $9 billion in revenues in 2014, while the National Football League took in close to $10 billion. 

Clinicians and patients alike know that traditional cancer treatments beat up the person as much as the cancer. Success arises only if the treatment kills the cancer before the patient. For decades, researchers sought solutions that attacked only the cancer, not healthy tissue.

Two cannabis testing labs from Colorado share their thoughts on how the state’s emerging recreational marijuana industry has affected them.

Like great athletes and musicians, cells employed in cell-based assays or as expression systems for biopharmaceutical production are not born, but made. Cell lines that perform specifically and predictably arise from a population of cells that have undergone one or more genetic transformations (transfection) and are subsequently selected for desirable properties such as viability, protein or virus production; high culture density; or binding to drugs or antigens.

For the general public, the concern over food fraud revolves around headline-grabbing examples, such as melamine—an organic compound used in plastics—appearing in infant formula from China in 2008 and beef replaced with horsemeat in the UK in 2013. 

Care and maintenance practices for laboratory balances range from the sublimely simple to concerns about gravitational forces.