“I’m a professional pin-in-a-haystack seeker,” geneticist Thijn Brummelkamp responds when asked why he excels at tracking down proteins and genes that other people did not find, despite the fact that some have managed to remain elusive for as long as forty years. His research group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute has once again managed to track down one of these “mystery ...

Stanford University scientists have described a new type of test that can detect genetic mutations in minute amounts of DNA released from cancer cells into the blood. The test, which is called single color digital PCR, requires only a fraction of a tube of blood and can detect as few as three mutation-bearing molecules in a single reaction. According to ...