Category: Resources

Roughly two-thirds of the biomedical technology research and development programs formerly in the National Center for Research Resources are now part of NIGMS. Housed in the Biomedical Technology Branch of our Division of Biomedical Technology, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology, the programs meet the needs of biomedical researchers by supporting cutting-edge research and development activities through a variety of award mechanisms.

In this post, I will focus on the Biomedical Technology Research Centers (BTRC) program, which supports the development and advancement of technologies needed to address today’s compelling biomedical research questions.

The 65 national resource centers—34 are funded by NIGMS and 31 by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering—are available to scientists doing basic, translational and clinical biomedical research, providing them access to instruments, methods, software, expertise and hands-on training. With priority given to NIH-funded investigators, scientists have the opportunity to work closely and collaboratively with experts at the centers to:

• Adapt BTRC tools to further the specific aims of their projects.
• Contribute to the generation of pioneering technologies that can open up new research paths.

The BTRC program has been developing and providing access to state-of-the-art resources for 50 years, and it is directly responsible for such milestone innovations as:

• The introduction of the computer into the laboratory setting.
• The evolution of magnetic spin resonance from an observed scientific phenomenon to an analytical research tool to a clinical imaging technique.
• The development of technologies for harnessing synchrotron radiation for biomedical research.
• The creation of informatics approaches that allow for secure access to and sharing of huge volumes of dissimilar data.

At the half-century mark, the BTRC program remains vital and responsive to the scientific community. Ongoing centers continue to evolve and create innovative technologies, while new centers form as needs emerge.

We encourage you to take advantage of these valuable research resources. For more information about the NIGMS-funded BTRCs or other biomedical technology programs, please feel free to call 301-435-0755 or e-mail one of the following program directors:

• Fred Friedman
• Doug Sheeley
• Amy Swain
• Mary Ann Wu

With NIGMS support through a Recovery Act grant, the American Society for Cell Biology has established The Cell: An Image Library . The resource is a freely accessible, easy-to-search, public repository of reviewed and annotated images, videos and animations of cells.

The goal is to create a single place where scientists—as well as educators, students and the general public—can find images of cellular structures and processes. The library currently houses more than 3,600 representative images from different organisms and cell types. You can search for specific images or browse by a number of categories.

You can use the library to:

• Locate historical and recent images to use in slide presentations or classroom lectures,
• Study how structures behave in a cell with the movies and animations,
• Compare cellular structures from different organisms,
• Generate new scientific questions based on observed characteristics, and
• Identify potential collaborators.

The curators continue to improve the site and to add images. Plans include future collections related to diseased cells. I encourage you to draw from the library and also to submit your own images.

If you have feedback on the library, you can send it to the manager, David Orloff.

To help students develop a rich understanding of evolution, NIH has just published a new high school curriculum supplement, Evolution and Medicine, that includes two weeks of lessons.

I particularly like the supplement because it shows through clear, scientifically-valid examples that evolutionary biology is fundamental to understanding health and disease. For instance, a unit on lactase persistence demonstrates how variation is distributed geographically and how it’s associated with the environment. There’s a unit on influenza that focuses on the evolutionary principles underlying vaccine development, and another that explains the evolutionary rationale for using model organisms.

The supplement was produced by the NIH Office of Science Education, but many of us at NIGMS were involved in developing and reviewing it. You can see an outline and order a copy for your own use or to share with others. A version of the supplement that you can review online and a downloadable teacher’s guide are coming soon. Descriptions of and links to other curriculum supplements are also available.

Great news for biochemists, biologists and structural biologists—more than 50,000 protein expression plasmids and almost 100 empty vectors are now available through the PSI:Biology-Materials Repository . This includes about 900 membrane protein plasmids, and we expect this number—plus that for human proteins—to grow in the coming months.

The repository has carefully collected, maintained and annotated these materials generated by scientists involved in the Protein Structure Initiative. In addition, it has developed and optimized the empty vectors for producing proteins in bacteria, yeast and cell-free systems. For a modest charge, you can order the plasmids and vectors from the online catalog .

Many of the plasmids represent proteins whose crystal structures have been determined but whose biological functions are not yet known. Search the repository  or use the Functional Sleuth to find out if the structure of your favorite protein or a similar one has already been determined.

If you can’t locate the plasmids you need in the PSI collection, you might search the larger DNASU plasmid repository , which houses the PSI:Biology Materials Repository. This central repository offers plasmids from hundreds of organisms and special collections, including human kinases, the Thermotoga maritime genome and a new set of 180 glycoenzymes.