An Impressive Jump In Efficiency

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

The limiting factor in much of modern biomedical research - beyond government interference, that is - is the rate at which biochemical mechanisms, compounds and genes of interest can be identified as starting points or linked to medical conditions. Given such a starting point, research is startlingly fast, but obtaining that starting point can be slow indeed. So this news from EurekAlert is a very welcome and impressive advance: researchers have "developed a method that could speed up the process of identifying novel protein molecules for medical or biological research hundreds of times over. ... Searches that now take a year to complete can be done in a matter of days. ... The results from a screen completed in one afternoon were equivalent to those previously obtained through several rounds of mutation and screening - a several-month process."

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/acft-wtc020206.php