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Sites of interest on the World Wide Web—edited by David Roman

This past month, the Lasker foundation presented The 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. Scientific and biographical information on this year’s award recipients can be found at http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/thisyear.html, as well as streaming interviews with the five winners, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, Jack Szostak, Aaron Beck, and Joseph Gall.

MOLECULAR LIBRARIES SCREENING FROM THE NIH

This issue of Molecular Interventions features an article by John Lazo, Principal Investigator at the Pittsburgh Molecular Libraries Screening Center. This NIH Roadmap initiative, the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network (MLSCN), establishes ten centers, nationwide, for the purpose of advancing the use of unique screens of deposited compounds for activity at targets submitted by investigators. Each center is unique in its approach to screening, and an outline of the NIH Roadmap initiative can be found at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/molecularlibraries/. In addition, information on the related NIH Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository, as well as links to the individual screening centers, can be found at http://mlsmr.discoverypartners.com/MLSMR_HomePage/centers.html.

GREAT SOFTWARE TOOLS AT A GREAT PRICE

The continual goal of stretching a budget is a facet of research that most people do not enjoy. However, some developers on the Web have fashioned free software tools that could come in very handy, and possibly alleviate the need to purchase expensive software packages for specific research goals. We have written about Vector NTI from Invitrogen, but it warrants mention again in this edition. It’s a very powerful molecular biology software program for plasmid record keeping, construct design, restriction enzyme analysis, sequence alignments and analysis, as well as some protein analysis tools. Best of all, this software is free for academic researchers and students. Check it out at http://www.invitrogen.com. One shortcoming of the Vector NTI toolkit is that it does not run on the latest version of Mac OS X (Tiger). However, Mac users have a couple of free options as well in this area of software. Enzymex, located at http://mekentosj.com/enzymex/, is a 2006 Apple Design Award winner, and makes plasmid maps, does sequence analysis, and even handles inventory of restriction enzymes. Also available is a free download called Enzyme Xtra that allows users to develop their own plug-ins for the program. Mekentosj also offers a cool "solutions" widget (http://mekentosj.com/widgets/) for calculating mass, volume, molecular weight, or molarity when three of the four fields are filled in. Handy. Also, Scott Russell has made a PubMed search widget available at http://homepage.mac.com/scottrussell/widget/. It’s a very cool tool as well.

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