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Tag: "virginia" at biology news

Virginia Tech group adds tools to DNA-targeted anti-cancer drugs

Chemistry and biology researchers at Virginia Tech have enhanced the abilities of the molecules they are creating to deliver killing blows to cancer cells. The man-made molecular complexes enter cancer cells and, when signaled, deliver killing medicine or cause the cell to change. The new supermolecules have more units that will absorb light - providing more control over the range of light freque...

Virginia Tech, Nanjing Institute researchers discover half-billion year-old fossils

Scientists interested in ancient life have a wealth of fossils and impressions frozen in rocks that they can study from as far back as 540 million years ago ?when animals with shells and bones began to become plentiful. But evidence of complex life older than 540 million years is scant and difficult to study. . Now, a research team from Virginia Tech in the United States and Nanjing Institute of...

Virginia Tech football player uses prototype cast

Virginia Tech's starting running back Cedric Humes was able to play against Boston College despite a broken arm (the ulna bone) thanks, in part, to a prototype composite brace designed for him by Virginia Tech engineers. . Brian Love, a professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering, and his biomaterials class met with Mike Goforth, Virginia Tech's director of athlet...

Virginia Tech scientists develop process for creating biocompatible fibers

Scientists at Virginia Tech have developed a single-step process for creating nonwoven fibrous mats from a small organic molecule ?creating a new nanoscale material with potential applications where biocompatible materials are required, such as scaffolds for tissue growth and drug delivery. . The research will be presented in the Jan. 20 issue of Science, in the article, "Phospholipid Nonwoven El...

Virginia Tech helping to develop higher quality, disease-resistant wheat varieties

Researchers at Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences are part of consortium of public wheat breeders and scientists that have been awarded $5 million from the USDA to enable routine use of modern breeding technologies to produce higher quality, disease-resistant wheat. . "For the past two decades, an intensive amount of molecular research has been conducted wherein chromosome s...

Virginia Bioinformatics Institutes launches microbial database

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have launched a publicly-available microbial database to host a range of microbial genome sequences. . The VBI Microbial Database (VMD), which is described in a recent article published in Nucleic Acids Research (Vol.34, D379-D381), contains genome sequence and annotation data for the plant pathogens Phytophthora sojae and Phyt...

Virginia Tech's System X supercomputer provides super tool for simulation of cell division

Virginia Tech researchers in computer science and biology have used the university's supercomputer, System X, to create models and algorithms that make it possible to simulate the cell cycle -- the processes leading to cell division. They have demonstrated that the new mathematical models and numerical algorithms provide powerful tools for studying the complex processes going on inside living cel...