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On the long and difficult road toward a carbon-neutral source of transportation fuels, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is pursuing a diversified approach. This effort involves exploring a range of potential new fuel sources in nature: from plants that may serve as cellulosic feedstocks?fast-growing trees and perennial grasses on land?to oil-producing organisms in aquatic and other environments, such as algae and bacteria.

A unique collaboration among physician-scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has yielded the most comprehensive genomic analysis of prostate cancer to date. "Genomic studies in other cancer types have resulted in new drug targets and strategies to classify patients into clinically meaningful subgroups that improve treatment decisions," said senior study author Charles Sawyers, Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at MSKCC and a HHMI investigator. "This first -ever database of its type brings us one step closer to achieving that goal in prostate cancer."

The results of the sequencing and analysis of the human body louse genome, which were published on June 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), offer new insights into the intriguing biology of this disease-vector insect. The project involved more than 70 international scientists led by Professor Evgeny Zdobnov at the University of Geneva Medical School and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, with Professor Barry Pittendrigh at the University of Illinois and Professor Ewen Kirkness at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Researchers at Virginia Tech, New York University (NYU), and the University of Milan, Italy, have created a data mining algorithm they call GOALIE that can automatically reveal how biological processes are coordinated in time.

The completion of three pilot projects designed to determine how best to build an extremely detailed map of human genetic variation begins a new chapter in the international project called 1,000 Genomes (http://www.1000genomes.org/page.php?page=home), said the director of the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center (http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/), which is a major contributor to the effort.