Friday, January 27, 2012

Biotech Companies

Top Ten Biotech companies of India to work with
  1. Panacea Biotech
  2. Biocon
  3. Serum Institute of India
  4. Eli Lilly
  5. Avesthagen
  6. Dr. Reddy's
  7. Ranbaxy India Ltd
  8. Sisco Research Labs
  9. Reliance Life Sciences
  10. Monsanto Seeds 

Biotech Companies 

Laser Beams Detect Blood Glucose In Early Experiments !!

For millions of people with diabetes, daily finger pricking with needles in order to get a measurement of their blood glucose is an accepted, but unpleasant, part of their lifestyles. Though physicists have been trying to come up with laser beam technology that effectively substitutes for the needle, the accomplishment has evaded them for the past 20 years.  Now, physicists at the University of Toronto (UT) have found a way to get around the most prickly problem with using a laser beam….
The prickly stickler is that a single beam picks up more than just blood.  It also picks up elements that hang out in the blood, like water, which makes up most of blood’s volume.  But water soaks up the mid-infrared light that is used, just as blood does, and the two elements cannot be separated.
The UT physicists, however, came up with the brilliant idea of using two infrared lights with slightly different wavelengths – one which is absorbed by water and glucose, the other only by water.  Both beams strike the glucose, but the beams cancel out each other, and the absorbed water produces enough heat that only the glucose is spotlighted.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/
Though the technique has not been tested on humans, it has been successfully tested on human blood serum. and it has been found to be sensitive to very small amounts of blood.  Though critics note that the laser technique still has a long way to go to prove itself as a substitute for the needle, this two beam technique is a big step.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Barack Obama on Stem Cell Research

Stem Cell treatment - Overview of Procedure

This animation describes how stem cells from the patient's abdominal fat are used to treat various diseases, such as MS, ALS, Stroke, Diabetes, Lung Disease, Heart Disease, Othropedic, etc.

mRNA Splicing

operon LAC

Missing Sixth sense? Did you know our ancestors had it !

People experience the world through five senses but sharks, paddlefishes and certain other aquatic vertebrates have a sixth sense: They can detect weak electrical fields in the water and use this information to detect prey, communicate and orient themselves.

A study in the Oct. 11 issue of Nature Communications that caps more than 25 years of work finds that the vast majority of vertebrates – some 30,000 species of land animals (including humans) and a roughly equal number of ray-finned fishes – descended from a common ancestor that had a well-developed electroreceptive system.
Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com
This ancestor was probably a predatory marine fish with good eyesight, jaws and teeth and a lateral line system for detecting water movements, visible as a stripe along the flank of most fishes. It lived around 500 million years ago. The vast majority of the approximately 65,000 living vertebrate species are its descendants.
Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 
“This study caps questions in developmental and evolutionary biology, popularly called ‘evo-devo,’ that I’ve been interested in for 35 years,” said Willy Bemis, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a senior author of the paper. Melinda Modrell, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who did the molecular analysis, is the paper’s lead author.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a major split in the evolutionary tree of vertebrates. One lineage led to the ray-finned fishes, or actinopterygians, and the other to lobe-finned fishes, or sarcopterygians; the latter gave rise to land vertebrates, Bemis explained. Some land vertebrates, including such salamanders as the Mexican axolotl, have electroreception and, until now, offered the best-studied model for early development of this sensory system. As part of changes related to terrestrial life, the lineage leading to reptiles, birds and mammals lost electrosense as well as the lateral line.

Some ray-finned fishes – including paddlefishes and sturgeons – retained these receptors in the skin of their heads. With as many as 70,000 electroreceptors in its paddle-shaped snout and skin of the head, the North American paddlefish has the most extensive electrosensory array of any living animal, Bemis said.
Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 
Until now, it was unclear whether these organs in different groups were evolutionarily and developmentally the same.

Using the Mexican axolotl as a model to represent the evolutionary lineage leading to land animals, and paddlefish as a model for the branch leading to ray-finned fishes, the researchers found that electrosensors develop in precisely the same pattern from the same embryonic tissue in the developing skin, confirming that this is an ancient sensory system.

The researchers also found that the electrosensory organs develop immediately adjacent to the lateral line, providing compelling evidence “that these two sensory systems share a common evolutionary heritage,” said Bemis.

Researchers can now build a picture of what the common ancestor of these two lineages looked like and better link the sensory worlds of living and fossil animals, Bemis said.

Biotech India