Keeping dissection alive for medical students.

Traditional dissection teaching is being reduced in a number of medical schools, particularly in the United Kingdom. In response to this, 12 medical students from Warwick University, UK, traveled to the Island of Grenada for an intensive extracurricular dissection course at St. George's University.

RbcX can function as a rubisco chaperonin, but is non-essential in Synechococcus PCC7942.

In most cyanobacteria, the gene rbcX is co-transcribed with the rbcL and rbcS genes that code for the large and small subunits of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco). Previous co-expression studies in Escherichia coli of cyanobacterial Rubisco and RbcX have identified a chaperonin-like function for RbcX. The organization of the rbcLXS operon has, to a certain extent, precluded definitive gene function studies of rbcX in cyanobacteria.

State transitions: an example of acclimation to low-light stress.

State 1-State 2 transitions ('state transitions') are a rapid physiological adaptation mechanism that adjusts the way absorbed light energy is distributed between photosystem I and photosystem II. They occur in both green plants and cyanobacteria, although the light-harvesting complexes involved are very different. Which aspects of the mechanism are conserved in green plants and cyanobacteria and which may be different, are discussed.

Nitrogen-regulated hypermutator strain of Synechococcus sp. for use in in vivo artificial evolution.

Artificially evolved variants of proteins with roles in photosynthesis may be selected most conveniently by using a photosynthetic organism, such as a cyanobacterium, whose growth depends on the function of the target protein. However, the limited transformation efficiency of even the most transformable cyanobacteria wastes much of the diversity of mutant libraries of genes produced in vitro, impairing the coverage of sequence space. This highlights the advantages of an in vivo approach for generating diversity in the selection organism itself.