Nano-Probes Stay Inside a Cell's Nucleus for Days

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) have developed fluorescent and stable nano-probes which can stay inside a cell's nucleus for hours or even days. According to this LBL news release, this will help biologists to better understand nuclear processes that evolve slowly, such as DNA replication, genomic alterations, and cell cycle control. This research was partially based on previous investigations about quantum dots. Now, the researchers want to tailor their quantum dots, which emit different colors depending on their sizes, to check specific chemical reactions inside nuclei, such as how proteins help repair DNA after irradiation. Read more for other details and references and to see how a nano-sized probe is entering a cell's nucleus."

Comments

Alarmist

[ossington]

Am I the only one who's scared that they've managed to create nanobots that can stay inside of us?

Re:Dear god, not another one.

[CdBee]

That's probably not helpful. Posting it as an AC, even less so.

Question to the mature Slashdot community. I'm aware that Piquepaille runs a site called Technology Trends which at a brief examination seems to be a reasonably typical tech site written from an insider's PoV, so he's well qualified to submit at Slashdot.. but how does he do it so often?

This isn't just sour grapes - I had a story accepted once and I rarely submit - but this guy's so prolific it makes me wonder what he's doing right.

Observe without interfering?

[amanox]

I'm just curious : how can they observer without interfering the process they observe? I'm no biologist, but I'm pretty sure the nucleus must have some kind of reaction to a foreign body entering it. Not to mention the recation coused by the illuminating the nucleus: these probes seem to emit some kind of light. This must have at least some effect on the readings they get from these probes.

Re:Observe without interfering?

[allnameswheretaken]

A cell does have a defense system of its own. How else would some bacteria have resistance to virii?

One of the ways that molecular biologists knock out genes that they wish to study is by a proccess called RNA inteference. They do this by inserting a peice of DNA with the complementary sequence of the targeted gene. The cell then transcribes both the gene and the opposite gene into mRNA, these two mRNA fragments hybridize forming double stranded RNA. A typical cell never has stranded RNA (virii do cause double stranded RNA though). The cell recognises the double stranded RNA and digests it an enzyme. The beuty of this method is that it can be regulated, instead of knocking the gene out they can reduce the levels of transcription or only knock the gene out once the organism has reached maturity

Prokaryotes have a much simpler method for dealing with foreign DNA. The deal with it by break down any DNA with certain sequences (say ATGA) which would cut on average every 2^4 base pairs