This Week in Science: Mar 30, 2007

A news item digs into the recent National Research Council report recommending a Global Metagenomics Initiative to better understand the microbial world through a mega-sequencing project.

A paper from lead authors Hang Yin and Joanna Slusky at the University of Pennsylvania discuss a new computational approach called CHAMP that allows users to design peptides that target specific transmembrane helices.

Also from U Penn, Joonil Jung and Nancy Bonini publish work using a Drosophila model for CAG/polyglutamine disease spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, through which they witnessed traits common to human CAG-repeat instability. They posit that "toxic consequences of pathogenic polyQ protein may include enhancing repeat instability."

From the Children's Medical Research Institute and lead author Scott Cohen comes a paper on the composition of telomerase by purifying it and performing mass spec sequencing to determine protein components and molecular size.