The RIBOREG EU funded project boosts SME product development

"Technological developments in the RIBOREG resulted also in two patents applied locally (Spain) in Europe by an SME partner (Biomedal) one with a University partner (ABC, Hungary) and one in collaboration with the Spanish National Research Council partner (CSIC, Spain). Furthermore, collaboration inside the RIBOREG project has allowed speeding up the development of the LNA probe technology, which allowed the SME partner Exiqon to commercialize a number of products based on this technology. The LNA probe technology is now sold in the miRCURY product series for in situ hybridization and Northerns as well as LNA oligonucleotides for knock down experiments and has spread to other European laboratories outside the RIBOREG consortium..

This information is available in the RIBOREG website:

Address: http://www.isv.cnrs-gif.fr/mc/riboreg/index.php

2nd DNA repair workshop

Building on the success of a 2003 workshop in Cortona, Italy, experts in DNA repair came together with systems biologists for a second workshop in 2005. This time 70 representatives of the two communities met in the American town of Stowe, against the glorious backdrop of a Vermont Indian summer.

At the Cortona workshop the two communities realised that the DNA damage response must be understood in the context of the global gene regulatory network and the entire protein interactome. This year the imperative to understand DNA damage at the systems level was just as strong, but now better tools exist to integrate different types of data about one or more biological processes. As a result, researchers are able to simultaneously examine damage to protein, DNA, RNA and lipids in stressed cells, to solve protein-DNA co-crystals at high resolution and to set out to map every reaction in every cell of a multicellular organism.

Four days of intense discussions produced many new ideas and concepts, for example that the response to DNA damage is complex and coordinated and must be understood in the context of the larger response to cellular damage. The participants also identified challenges that lie ahead, including the need to create a large bioinformatics infrastructure for collecting, analysing and storing all the relevant data, and the tools to do predictive modelling with limited data (see graph by Leona Samson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, below).

The next workshop in the series, which is sponsored by the US National Cancer Institute, the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the European Commission’s DG Research (Health Directorate under a Specific Support Action), will be held in 2007 or 2008, possibly in Cortona again. A summary of the 2005 workshop will be published in DNA Repair and a more detailed report is expected to appear later in Mutation Research.

http://www.uvm.edu/conferences/systemsbiology05/