GEN-ERIC News

Some companies pay millions to have their logos on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s racecar, but others prefer to pay Brian Katz $500 or more a month for space on his Ford Expedition. Mr. Katz, 32, of Manhattan, is one of the tens of thousands of motorists who have signed up to have their cars and trucks wrapped in advertisements in exchange for a stipend up to $800 a month. These offers are becoming so popular that car owners have been willing to limit where they shop and abide by a code of conduct while they are behind the wheel.

Scientists in France and Italy have deciphered the complete genetic code for the plant producing wine grapes, according to a study published Sunday. While the findings will do nothing to enhance the mystique of winemaking, they could pave the way for gene-based manipulations to boost flavour and improve resistance against disease. Dozens of researchers analyzing the Pinot Noir varietal of Vitis vinifera, the core species from which virtually all grape wine is made, found twice as many genes contributing to aroma than in other sequenced plants, suggesting that wine flavours could be traced to the genome level. The French-Italian Public Consortium for Grapevine Genome Characterisation, which collectively authored the study, also gained crucial insights into the genetic evolution of plants over the last 200 million of years.

From September 2006 to April 2007, the percentage of Americans in cellphone-only households for the first time overtook the percentage in landline-only households, according to Mediamark Research, a firm that has been tracking such data since the mid-1980s. The milestone is a natural consequence of two trends: a glacially slow decline since 2000 in the percentage of households with landlines, and a steep rise in the number of households with cellphones. Mediamark said 84.5 percent of households now have landlines, and 86.2 percent have at least one cellphone. The data was collected through in-home surveys at roughly 13,000 homes across the country.

“Integrating a high-quality film of silicon nanoparticles 1 nanometer in size directly onto silicon solar cells improves power performance by 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum,” said Munir Nayfeh, a physicist at the University of Illinois and corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters. A 10 percent improvement in the visible range of the spectrum can be achieved by using nanoparticles 2.85 nanometers in size, said Nayfeh, who also is a researcher at the university’s Beckman Institute. In conventional solar cells, ultraviolet light is either filtered out or absorbed by the silicon and converted into potentially damaging heat, not electricity. In previous work, however, Nayfeh showed that ultraviolet light could efficiently couple to correctly sized nanoparticles and produce electricity. That work was reported in the August 2004 issue of the journal Photonics Technology Letters.

A new study shows that some types of bacteria can sense light, and that exposing one type of disease-causing bacterium–the Brucella bacterium–to light increases its capacity to infect humans and livestock. This study represents the first time that light has been shown to play a role in bacterial virulence (infection). Brucella bacteria “have been very well studied for years, and no one knew they could sense light,” said Trevor Swartz of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study’s lead author. “And now it seems like it’s a common thing rather than being an anomaly.” The study, which was partially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and conducted by an international team of scientists, is described in the August 24 issue of Science.

Fortunately, the boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), which devastated U.S. cotton crops for much of the 20th century, is now found only in parts of the mid-South and South Texas, thanks to eradication efforts. But monitoring weevils to keep track of where they are coming from—and where they’re going—is vital for protecting cotton crops in the United States. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) entomologist Tom Sappington works in the ARS Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research Unit at Ames, Iowa. He has tracked local weevil movements by marking the insects with enamel paint or fluorescent powders and recapturing them later. Now he uses “microsatellites”—short, repetitive DNA sequences—and population assignment tests to find out where weevils in different populations have come from. These tests help pinpoint the migratory patterns and origins of boll weevils over long distances.

New findings from insect studies at Queen¡¯s and U of T may help to protect our brains from extremely high fevers that sometimes trigger seizures, particularly in infants and small children. While the seizures themselves are generally harmless, a prolonged fever resulting from infection or heatstroke of over 108¢ªF (42¢ªC) can eventually lead to respiratory distress, cognitive dysfunction, brain damage, or death. The research suggests that manipulation of a single gene or genetic pathway in fruit flies and locusts will rapidly protect the nervous system from failure due to extreme heat stress. ¡°We¡¯ve been studying neuro-protective mechanisms in these model systems for more than a decade, and were amazed by the speed and potency of this treatment,¡± says senior researcher Mel Robertson, head of Biology at Queen¡¯s. The findings are published on-line today in the journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science ONE).