April 1, 2005

Lab Partners

By SILLA BRUSH

Utpal Banerjee has often used one or two undergraduates to help with research in his genetics lab at the University of California at Los Angeles. But never before have scores of them -- 138, to be precise -- appeared as co-authors on a research paper.

In the February issue of PLoS Biology, an online journal published by the Public Library of Science, an open-access publisher, Mr. Banerjee and his legion of young colleagues reported the identity of 501 genes essential to the