LEAMINGTON SPA, United Kingdom, May 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --DNA Dynamics, Inc. (OTC Pink: DNAD), a global developer and publisher of mobile videogames is delighted to announced that, through its wholly-owned subsidiary DNA Interactive Ltd, and in collaboration with Appbackr, Inc. and Bad Neighbors, Inc., THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P. is at long last now available for download on iOS devices.

Named as one of the most anticipated mobile games of 2012 by Pocket Gamer, THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P. was designed by DNA and Bad Neighbors as an uproarious adventure game that introduces a fresh twist to the venerable Paramount Pictures film franchise. Spoofing modern crime dramas and popular video gaming culture, THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P. features classic 2-D adventure gaming updated for today's modern audiences. Gameplay features include finger-numbing mini-games, collectible objects, upgradeable environments, completely arbitrary unlockable outfits and surprise cameos by some of the gaming world's most notoriously obnoxious characters.

Bob LoCash, the original film series writer/producer who penned the game's all-new storyline, stated, "Bringing this new chapter to life with the amazing and talented crew at DNA (I was held hostage for three days with a sack over my head until I agreed to the preceding statement) was a total pleasure. This game is something special - a funny and engaging piece of entertainment that will hopefully win the hearts of Naked Gun fans, gaming fans, and comedy fans alike. If not, there's always dinner theatre."

Channelling the hard-nosed, but dumb-witted characters brought to life in the film series, THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P tasks mobile gamers to follow Lt. Frank Drebin's son, Frank Drebin, Jr. along with his brand-new crime-fighting team to dispense justice on evil-doers which, let's face it, should be easier than finding morbidly obese people at a Renaissance Fair!

THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P. is available for $4.99 or about the same price as a gallon of milk for your needy family - from the App Store for iPad and iPhone.

About Bad Neighbors, Inc.Bad Neighbors Inc. is a multimedia company dedicated to returning the lost arts of narrative and twisted humor into video games, feature films, and television. THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P. is their first title. Other projects in development include the feature-film comedies THE NOBODY and STUDS, currently in pre-production with Stove Village Pictures.

About Appbackr Inc.Appbackr Inc. is a privately funded startup based in Palo Alto, CA. The first wholesale marketplace for apps, appbackr's approach revolutionizes the mobile industry by solving common funding and distribution problems. Appbackr enables app developers to raise cash without giving up equity in the company or product. Winner of the PayPal X Developer Challenge and SVASE/Cambridge West Ventures Seed Fund Award, the Company was also selected as an AlwaysOn Global 250 Company.

About DNA Interactive LtdEstablished in 2010, DNA Interactive, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DNA Dynamics, is a publisher of games and apps for mobile and tablet devices including iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. At the present time, DNA Interactive's IP portfolio is comprised of proprietary game titles which include Quest of Legends, Jigsawium, Legacy: Mystery Mansion, Chess Crusade and Sudokium. Its licensed titles include The Naked Gunand Warheads: Medieval Tales. For more information, please visit http://www.dna-interactive.com.

About DNA Dynamics, Inc.Headquartered in Leamington Spa in the United Kingdom, DNA Dynamics is a worldwide developer and publisher of graphically rich, highly experiential interactive entertainment currently delivered on iOS, Android, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP platforms. Through its operating subsidiaries, DNA Studios and DNA Interactive, the Company has created, acquired or licensed a portfolio of highly recognizable or emerging brands that broadly appeal to its consumer demographics, ranging from children to adults and casual gamers to serious enthusiasts. For more information, please go to http://www.dnadynamics.net. You can also follow the Company on Facebook and Twitter.

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DNA Dynamics Announces Release Of THE NAKED GUN: I.C.U.P.® For iOS® Devices -- In Glorious 2-D

Public release date: 31-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Yivsam Azgad news@weizmann.ac.il 972-893-43856 Weizmann Institute of Science

Our ability to "read" DNA has made tremendous progress in the past few decades, but the ability to understand and alter the genetic code, that is, to "rewrite" the DNA-encoded instructions, has lagged behind. A new Weizmann Institute study advances our understanding of the genetic code: It proposes a way of effectively introducing numerous carefully planned DNA segments into genomes of living cells and of testing the effects of these changes. The study is being reported in the June issues of Nature Biotechnology and Nature Genetics.

Until now, changing the DNA sequence has been a slow and labor-intensive process. It took several weeks to alter just one DNA region at a time; testing the effects of each of these changes took even longer. In the new study, Weizmann Institute scientists have developed a technology that makes it possible to simultaneously introduce tens of thousands of DNA regions into tens of thousands of living cells each region in a separate cell in a planned and systematic manner, and to measure the results of each such change with great precision and within a single experiment.

"This fast method will significantly advance our ability to understand the 'language' of DNA," says research team leader Prof. Eran Segal, of the Weizmann Institute's Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Molecular Cell Biology Departments. "Reading out a person's entire genome is already a manageable task, but what exactly is written in that genome? After all, a genome looks like a lengthy string of letters whose meaning is for the most part obscure. Just deciphering the DNA letters is like trying to understand a foreign language by listening to it being spoken. Our method will help us identify DNA 'words' and understand their meaning."

Understanding what's written in the DNA might help us interpret, among other things, how genotypic differences among people generate observable differences among them, from the way we look to the way our cells function. Thus, for example, it might be possible to clarify which genetic differences are responsible for the development of various diseases in certain individuals. The Weizmann Institute technology can also lead to improved genetic therapies based on introducing new genes or improved regulatory sequences into cells in order to repair genetic defects.

In the present study, the scientists investigated a vital aspect of the DNA language: How the control of gene expression is encoded in the DNA that is, the instructions determining the level of activity of each gene in the genetic code. Since gene activity levels have crucial effects on cell function, this question, considered one of the central in molecular biology, has been studied for decades. The new technology has enabled the scientists to isolate and test the effects of various parameters on gene activity levels: For example, how a gene's activity level is affected by the gene's distance from its regulatory sequence. The researchers have managed to elucidate how various parameters define the regulatory "language" and to demonstrate how deliberate changes in the genetic sequence affect these parameters in a way that alters the level of a gene's activity in a predictable manner.

The new method consists of four steps that combine existing technologies in an innovative manner. The steps are: creation of 50,000 different genetic sequences on DNA chips; massive insertion of these sequences into cells at the same time; sorting the cells with the help of a sorting machine that senses the expression levels of a "reporter" gene; and high-throughput parallel DNA sequencing.

Taking part in the study were Weizmann Institute's graduate students Eilon Sharon, Tali Raveh-Sadka and Michal Levo, research assistant Dr. Yael Kalma and research associate Dr. Adina Weinberger, as well as Dr. Zohar Yakhini from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Agilent Laboratories, Santa Clara, California.

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Rewriting DNA to understand what it says

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Illumina (ILMN) today introduced the Nextera XT DNA Sample Preparation Kit, the easiest way for researchers to prepare and sequence small genomes, PCR amplicons, and plasmids. When paired with Illuminas MiSeq system, Nextera XT provides the fastest time to result of any next-generation sequencing technology currently available, enabling researchers to go from genomic DNA to analyzed data in less than 8 hours.

Nextera is the industrys fastest sequencing sample preparation technology, with a simple assay that fragments DNA and inserts sequencing adapters and barcodes, all in a single tube. Nextera XT builds on this foundation with its cost-effective and improved workflow. The kits innovative sample normalization procedure eliminates the need for library quantitation prior to sample pooling and sequencing.

Whether you are sequencing bacterial or viral genomes, plasmids, or PCR amplicons, the Nextera XT DNA Sample Preparation kit delivers the fastest time to answer, said Christian Henry, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Illuminas Genomic Solutions Business. Researchers will easily and cost-effectively be able to prepare a large number of amplicons by simultaneously pooling and preparing them with Nextera XT. Up to 96 samples can then be combined and rapidly sequenced to enable flexible and scalable study design.

Additionally, Nextera XT DNA Sample Preparation Kits offer unique benefits to researchers including:

Nextera XT made transitioning our targeted HIV amplicon sequencing experiments to the MiSeq system extremely easy, said Dr. Jacques Corbeil from the Infectious Disease Research Center in Quebec and Canada Research Chair in Medical Genomics. The output of the MiSeq system helps us screen many more samples rapidly, and its high-quality data enables us to detect low-frequency HIV variants.

Illuminas Nextera XT DNA Sample Preparation Kits are now shipping. For more information, visit http://www.illumina.com/xt.

About Illumina

Illumina (www.illumina.com) is a leading developer, manufacturer, and marketer of life science tools and integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and function. We provide innovative sequencing and array-based solutions for genotyping, copy number variation analysis, methylation studies, gene expression profiling, and low-multiplex analysis of DNA, RNA, and protein. We also provide tools and services that are fueling advances in consumer genomics and diagnostics. Our technology and products accelerate genetic analysis research and its application, paving the way for molecular medicine and ultimately transforming healthcare.

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Illumina Introduces Nextera® XT DNA Sample Preparation Kits

LEGO, eat your heart out. Blocks of DNA have been programmed to automatically build themselves into nanoscopic structures. Eventually the DNA programmes will be sophisticated enough to churn out minuscule therapeutic devices that work inside the body.

Single-stranded DNA has already proved itself to be a useful addition to the nanotechnologist's toolbox. A very long strand can be intricately folded into complex 3D structures through a process known, appropriately, as DNA origami. These structures could be used to ferry drugs to specific sites in the human body.

But those long strands typically come from a virus, which raises the possibility that the body will attack the structures. Now, Peng Yin and colleagues at Harvard University have designed a similar technology that relies entirely on synthetic DNA. "Our structures could be made to be highly biocompatible," he says.

Instead of folding one long strand of viral DNA, Yin's team designed short synthetic DNA strands that can fold into a small tile, just 7 by 3 nanometres in size. "Each tile acts like a Lego block," he says. Tiles automatically interlock with neighbouring tiles that carry a complementary DNA sequence. This means that with a bit of forward planning, the team could design a complete set of tiles that lock together to create more than 100 shapes - including any letter of the alphabet.

The synthetic DNA shapes could dodge the immune system, buying them more time to shuttle drugs to the right tissue (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11075).

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DNA origami: synthetic tiles can make over 100 shapes

B. Wei et al. / Wyss Institute, Harvard

This atomic-force microscopy shows 100 shapes, each created from tiles of DNA strands. Each shape takes up a space measuring 150 by 150 nanometers, or roughly one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

By Alan Boyle

The DNA molecule serves as the code of life, but it also serves as handy building material for nanoscale structures and newly published research shows how patterns as complex as letters, numbers and smiley faces can be created far more cheaply and quickly than previously thought.

Harvard researchers demonstrate the latest twists in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The process involves laying out short segmentsof DNA in a tile-shaped pattern determined by custom-designed chemical bonds. Those single-stranded tiles, in turn, can assemble themselves into larger shapes like Lego blocks, depending on how the bonds attach to one another. Different recipes for mixing the tiles together will produce different shapes.

The researchers Bryan Wei, Mingjie Dai and Peng Yinestimate that the process yielded the desired structure 12 to 17 percent of the time. That yield is far from perfect, but it could be perfectly acceptable for a process involving thousands upon thousands of self-assembling molecules.

The technique updates a construction strategy that was first pioneered in the 1980s. Back then, it took two years to create a 7-nanometer-wide cube from 10 strands of DNA, Caltech's Paul Rothemund and Aarhus University's Ebbe Sloth Andersen observed in a Nature commentary on the research. In contrast, the newly reported results suggest that far more complex shapes, measuring more than 100 nanometers across, could be churned out at an average rate of one per hour. (A human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide.)

Another attractive factor has to do with the cost: An alternate method for creating nanoscale shapes, known as DNA origami, twists one long molecular strand into a desired shape rather than using lots of smaller tiles. But for each different shape, a new set of molecular "staples" has to be synthesized at a cost of roughly $1,000, according to the Nature commentary. The Harvard researchers' method involves creating a $7,000 set of tiles that could theoretically produce 2 X 10^93 shapes. That's a 2 followed by 93 zeros.

In their Nature paper, Wei and his colleagues showed off 100 shapes including the Roman alphabet, numerical digits, punctuation marks, the peace sign, Chinese characters and 10 kinds of emoticons. They made use of a custom-designed computer program to aid in the design of the shapes and control the liquid-handling robot that mixed the DNA ingredients.

"This advance truly brings DNA nanotechnology into the rapid-prototyping age, and enables DNA shapes to be tailored for every experiment," Rothemund and Andersen wrote in their commentary.

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DNA designs done faster, cheaper

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2012) Researchers at the Wyss Institute have developed a method for building complex nanostructures out of short synthetic strands of DNA. Called single-stranded tiles (SSTs), these interlocking DNA "building blocks," akin to Legos, can be programmed to assemble themselves into precisely designed shapes, such as letters and emoticons. Further development of the technology could enable the creation of new nanoscale devices, such as those that deliver drugs directly to disease sites.

The technology, which is described in the May 30 online issue of Nature, was developed by a research team led by Wyss core faculty member Peng Yin, Ph.D., who is also an Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Other team members included Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Bryan Wei, Ph.D., and graduate student Mingjie Dai.

DNA is best known as a keeper of genetic information. But in an emerging field of science known as DNA nanotechnology, it is being explored for use as a material with which to build tiny, programmable structures for diverse applications. To date, most research has focused on the use of a single long biological strand of DNA, which acts as a backbone along which smaller strands bind to its many different segments, to create shapes. This method, called DNA origami, is also being pursued at the Wyss Institute under the leadership of Core Faculty member William Shih, Ph.D. Shih is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Cancer Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

In focusing on the use of short strands of synthetic DNA and avoiding the long scaffold strand, Yin's team developed an alternative building method. Each SST is a single, short strand of DNA. One tile will interlock with another tile, if it has a complementary sequence of DNA. If there are no complementary matches, the blocks do not connect. In this way, a collection of tiles can assemble itself into specific, predetermined shapes through a series of interlocking local connections.

In demonstrating the method, the researchers created just over one hundred different designs, including Chinese characters, numbers, and fonts, using hundreds of tiles for a single structure of 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in size. The approach is simple, robust, and versatile.

As synthetically based materials, the SSTs could have some important applications in medicine. SSTs could organize themselves into drug-delivery machines that maintain their structural integrity until they reach specific cell targets, and because they are synthetic, can be made highly biocompatible.

"Use of DNA nanotechnology to create programmable nanodevices is an important focus at the Wyss Institute, because we believe so strongly in its potential to produce a paradigm-shifting approach to development of new diagnostics and therapeutics," said Wyss Founding Director, Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.

The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

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Nanodevice manufacturing strategy using DNA 'Building blocks'

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - A murdered woman's family says a slow system cost their loved one her life.

DNA from a 2005 rape matched Christopher Wallace, but it took several weeks after initial confirmation for charges to be approved. During that time, a Muskegon-area mother of two was murdered in her home -- allegedly by Wallace.

Kalamazoo police investigating the rape pointed the finger at the slow process of getting the DNA analyzed -- a process that took place at the Michigan State Police Crime Lab in Grand Rapids.

MSP says its goal turnaround time on DNA evidence is 30 days.

That would have been enough to lock up Wallace, 34, before the murder, but it didn't happen in this case -- and the reason why boils down to a tight budget.

Police don't doubt now that Wallace should have been in prison for a 2005 rape, but they couldn't arrest him until it was too late for Jennifer Phillips.

"I believe that if they would have had him in prison where he should have been she would still be here," said Jennifer Phillips's sister Mary Phillips.

Jennifer, 37, was strangled to death in her home on Oct. 21, 2011, police say.

"I don't think she gave up until she couldn't try anymore," said Mary.

The holdup in the arrest, Kalamazoo police say, was in the confirmation process the DNA was going through to be checked for a match with the cold case rape.

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DNA match goal missed, woman murdered

Numbers, letters and symbols are some of the 100 or so self-assembled DNA shapes designed by Harvard scientists.

B. Wei, M. Dai, P. Yin/Wyss Inst. for Biologically Inspired Engineering/Harvard University

Scientists have developed a way to carve shapes from DNA canvases, including all the letters of the Roman alphabet, emoticons and an eagles head.

Bryan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues make these shapes out of single strands of DNA just 42 letters long. Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place.

In their simplest configuration, the tiles produce a solid 64-by-103-nanometre rectangle, but Wei and his team can create more complex shapes by leaving out specific tiles. Using this strategy, they created 107 two-dimensional shapes, including letters, numbers, Chinese characters, geometric shapes and symbols. They also produced tubes and rectangles of different sizes, including one consisting of more than 1,000 tiles. Their work is published today in Nature1.

Weis work revitalizes a technique used by Ned Seeman a chemist at New York University and pioneer in the field of DNA nanotechnology. As early as 1991, Seeman moulded short strands of DNA into cubes, tubes and lattices. It was laborious work and limited to small and simple designs2.

In 2006, Paul Rothemund from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena created bigger structures using a technique called DNA origami. He folded a 7,000-letter strand of DNA from the genome of the M13 virus into the right shape, and used around 200 smaller staple strands to hold it in place3.

Since then, long scaffolds have featured in all such work. Wei and his colleagues depart from this tradition. They show that small strands can be combined into large structures without the need for a scaffold, and with acceptable yields (the proportion of strands that assemble into shapes) of 1217%.

This approach clashes with the traditional thinking about tile-based assembly, says Kurt Gothelf, director of the Centre for DNA Nanotechnology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Many scientists assumed that small strands would need to be mixed in very precise ratios to avoid making fused or half-finished structures. It has long been assumed that this sets a limit for the size of structures that can efficiently be assembled in this way, he says.

Peng Yin, also from Harvard Medical School and leader of the study, thinks that the technique works because the strands are slow to assemble, but grow quickly once they start. This means that the shapes have a low probability of touching one another and fusing incorrectly as they begin to take shape.

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DNA drawing with an old twist