Troubleshooting Cell-based Assays..

In early 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris began to writhe, roar, contort, and complain of feeling bites and pinches. The local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed the girls with bewitchment, and a slave named Tituba was accused of witchcraft, setting off the series of events that would lead to the Salem Witch Trials.

Eppendorf is a leading life science company that develops and sells instruments, consumables, and services for liquid handling, sample handling, and cell handling in laboratories worldwide. Its product range includes pipettes and automated pipetting systems, dispensers, centrifuges, mixers, spectrometers, and DNA amplification equipment as well as ultra-low temperature freezers, fermentors, bioreactors, CO2 incubators, shakers, and cell manipulation systems.

Organisms follow the cycle of the day, even at the cellular level, creating an internal clock. Humans' biology will follow this circadian rhythm even when external stimuli like light or temperature changes don't occur. Researchers have now used a fruit fly model to identify a role for a gene called neurofibromin (NF1) in the regulation of the circadian rhythm. Mutations in Nf1 cause the disease neurofibromatosis, which leads to tumor growth in the nervous system.