Do you know Hubble ? Hubble is the space telescope that has been put into orbit around Earth in 1990. It has been a combined creation of the European Space Agency and the NASA. It is situated 569 km above the surface of Earth Why ? Simply because it works better this way. Hubble enables us to have a better knowledge of the universe. It is more efficient than ground telescopes. In fact, Earth’s atmosphere is distorting the view of telescopes on the ground. This "atmospheric distortion" is the reason that the stars seem to twinkle when you look up at the sky.

The arabinogalactan-protein is a protein that belongs to the family of glycoproteins which means proteins that carry molecules of glucose. In this case it is a molecule of Arabinose and Galactose. This group of protein exists in all plants cells surfaces and steps in their growth, development, differenciation, death of cells, and especially in somatic embryogenesis. Many labs are dropping this subject because it is too complicated but I would like to understand the way this molecules acts. Another reason is that these molecules are thought to have a medical interest by activating human immune defense system.

The cloned plant is the identical reproduction of a plant. For certain plants the best adapted method of cloning is somatic embryogenesis, which is the development of embryos from parts harvested from the plant. Somatic embryogenesis represents a great advantage : thanks to this method of cloning we obtain a huge number of plants in a short time. The selector needs samples for crossing the plant : as the plant is allogamic … it is necessary to get many different plants. The richer the genetic material is, the better the chance we have of achieving the best combination.

The Role of Women in the Alliance of Civilizations: “The full social and economic advancement of the world depends crucially on human development as a first priority. There is no sustainable human development without the joint participation of women and men in all creative activities, including Science and Technology”.

Quantitative proteomics is a field of science, which can be defined as the study of global changes in the expression level of proteins and has witnessed an enormous development in the last years. The genes and protein are changing because of the environmental or physiological conditions. The research consists in extracting two or more protein from altered tissues, as cells or body fluids, in order to determine the presence of proteins suffering an alteration in their expression levels. For example, I try to detect the characteristic patterns in body-fluid proteomes because they are the indication of a particular disease. I choose the field of gene expression because I think it is the best way to get rid of it at the root.

This is the second issue of the Twitter Interview. This month we had the pleasure to interview Rahajeng Tunjungputri. She has a lot of interesting things to say about how she sees women in science. Rahajeng Tunjungputri:  "I'm 25 year old and I finished my medical school last year. In 2005, as a student I received a grant from Asia Europe Foundation to join Asia Europe Young Volunteers Exchange in France and Italy, which introduced me to inter-cultural communication and sparked my interest to work with international communities. "

My research is in the area of “Structural and functional genomics of drought resistance in wild barley and wild wheat”. As you know, drought is a global problem that affect plants as wheat and barley, whereas they are the strategic crops worldwide in human and animal diet. Wild wheat and barley have very important genes/alleles which provide tolerance to plant for different types of environmental stresses such as drought. Our final target is to pick-up important alleles from wild germplasm transfer to the cultivated ones by conventional breeding methods to make them tolerant to drought conditions. As a result of our efforts, we aim to create tolerant, healthy, and disease-resistant plants to provide more food in a world.

This is the end of the week, so it is time to discover many interesting articles. 5 links to keep in touch with what is said on the Internet media and on blogs, 5 links to learn more.

I'm a student in Tumour Immunology and I'm working on a therapy using T cells for the treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (throat cancer) associated with Epstein Barr virus. This virus is from the family of Herpes. It is a major  virus which affects 90 percent of the worlwide population. It is hard to detect because the symptoms are sore throat, flu-like symptoms and people get it when they are oung. The virus stays in the body by invading the immune systems but remains at a "dormant" stage. The Espstein Barr virus only comes out when the immune system is very weak, for example when peopel are immunocompromised. At this moment, it becomes active and lead to a transformation of the cells, which become cancer cells.