I never thought of cells as event-passing Beans before. Interesting.
NOW, Rohit, your epiphany about cell-oriented programming is finally
starting to make sense to me...
:) A.
------> Jerusalem, Israel:
Israeli scientists Thursday said they had developed a kind of molecular
"radar" that allows them to watch how enzymes work inside cells.
They said their new tool would not only help them understand how cells
work, but could lead to new approaches to treating diseases such as
cancer in which cell signals go wrong.
"Previously, in studying message transmission inside the cells of a
developing organism, we scientists were rather like people at an airport
watching the planes take off and land," said Ben-Zion Shilo, head of the
Weizmann Institute of Science's molecular genetics department.
"Our new method gives us the ability equivalent to that of an air
traffic controller who looks at the dots on the radar screen and can
thus follow the movements of each plane step by step."
Shilo's team used phosphate atoms as the basis of their new
tool. Phosphate atoms help carry signals inside a cell in a process
known as phosphorylation -- a kind of chain reaction.
Reporting in the journal Science, they said they developed antibodies
that react only to molecules that are undergoing this process in a
certain way.
They used the antibodies to watch signals set off by a growth factor in
fruit fly cells.
The antibodies are easy to watch, they said.
"We can suddenly look at processes in a cell or embryo as they are
happening and don't have to infer things from the consequences any
more," Shilo said in a statement.
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adam@cs.caltech.edu
True power is an individual's ability to move from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm.
-- Winston Churchill