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University of Manchester makes made-to-measure skin and bones a reality using inkjet printers

Made-to-measure skin and bones, which couldbe used to treat burn victims or patients who have suffered severedisfigurements, may soon be a reality using inkjets which can printhuman cells.Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed thebreakthrough technology which will allow tailor-made tissues and bonesto be grown, simply by inputting their dimensions into a computer....

Study: 'homemade' gene expression technology unreliable

Technology for analyzing gene expression must be standardized among laboratories and across platforms around the world to support this age of human genome exploration, an Oregon Health & Science University researcher says. Otherwise, scientists using DNA microarrays, also known as gene chips, risk having their research results called into question, said Peter Spencer, Ph.D., professor...

Man-made wetland's effectiveness similar to natural marsh

Researchers who studied a man-made wetland in Ohio for two years concluded that the created wetland filtered and cleaned water as well as or better than would a natural marsh. The wetland, which was built in an agricultural area, reduced levels of phosphorus by nearly 60 percent and nitrates by 40 percent. Phosphorus and nitrates are prime ingredients in both fertilizers and in water poll...

Low oxygen likely made Great Dying worse, greatly delayed recovery

The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years. New research by two University of Washington scientists suggests that a sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen levels was likely a major reason for both the elevated extinction rates and the v...

'Mad cow' proteins successfully detected in blood

A method for identifying Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, has been cleared for diagnostic use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The test, known as the Gamma Phage Assay, was modified by scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to improve its performance and reliability when used with clinical specimens. The original...

Major advance made on DNA structure

Oregon State University researchers have made significant new advances in determining the structure of all possible DNA sequences ?a discovery that in one sense takes up where Watson and Crick left off, after outlining in 1953 the double-helical structure of this biological blueprint for life. One of the fundamental problems in biochemistry is to predict the structure of a molecule from it...

Wild grasses and man-made wheats advance research capabilities

Getting resistance to the latest biotype of greenbug or rust in wheat may require some bridge building. "We're looking for new unique sources of resistance to var...

Attacks of King George III's madness linked to key metabolism molecule

PGC-1 mediates effects of nutrition on blood disease porphyria The me...

Protein clue to tailor-made antibiotics

Scientists at the University of York have made a huge leap forward in the search for 'smarter' antibiotics. Bacteria like E. coli frequently try to kill each other when resources are scarce using protein antibiotics call...

UW-Madison scientists zero in on drugs' sweet spots

Employing a simple new technique to manipulate the sugars that power many front-line drugs, a team of Wisconsin scientists has enhanced the antic-cancer properties of a digitalis, a drug commonly used to treat heart disease. Reporting the work in the Aug. 8 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pharmaceuti...

New evidence questions the simple link between prion proteins and madcow disease

While newly published research confirms that under laboratory circumstances prion-protein can be absorbed across the gut, it also shows that this is unlikely to occur in real life. In addition, the results show that the places in the gut that do take up these disease-associated proteins are different from the locations where infectivity is known to be amplified. The findings will be published in...

Growth hormone is made in the brain, report scientists

Scientists have found that growth hormone, a substance that is used for body growth, is produced in the brain, according to an article published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers -- from three institutions –?found that growth hormone is produced within the hippocampus, a structure deep inside the brain that is involved in memory and emotion. </...

Successful cell engineering may lead to mad cow prevention, say researchers

Researchers at Texas A&M University have successfully "knocked down" the expression of possible disease-causing genes in a cloned goat fetus, perhaps paving the way for breeding disease resistance in other animals, even those genes that might cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad Cow Disease. Researchers Mark Westhusin and Charles Long in Texas A&M's C...

UW-Madison engineers squeeze secrets from proteins

Proteins, one of the basic components of living things, are among the most studied molecules in biochemistry. Understanding how proteins form or "fold" from sequenced strings of amino acids has long been one of the grand challenges of biology. A common belief holds that the more proteins are confined by their environment, the more stable - or less likely to unfold - they become. Now, as r...

Data published in PNAS show antibodies can be made 10 times more toxic to cancer cells

Engineering the "Fc" region of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) increases their toxicity to cancer cells, potentially improving the utility of targeted cancer therapies, according to research conducted at Xencor, which will be published in the March 14 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Monoclonal antibodies have important advantages over chemotherapy a...

Man-made heart tissue improves cardiac performance

Researchers have developed a method to engineer blood vessels within the tissue of previously engineered heart muscle. Trials have resulted in significant improvement in heart function. The study is published in the journal Artificial Organs. With heart disorders affecting individuals globally and contributing to increasing mortality rates, there has been a need to develop new treatmen...

Progress being made in exploring potential use of stem cells to treat heart disease

Scientists are making headway in exploring the potential future use of stem cells to treat heart disease, according to a review article in the current issue of Nature (June 29, 2006). Authored by Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease Director Deepak Srivastava, MD, and Gladstone Institutes postdoctoral scholar Kathryn Ivey, PhD, the paper cites a better understanding of the follow...

Healthy coral reefs of Madagascar resisting damage from climate change

Healthy coral reefs of Madagascar's northeast coast have so far resisted the damaging effects of warmer ocean temperatures attributed to global climate change, say scientists who recently studied the region. The survey of a previously unexplored region in March 2006 by scientists from Conservation International and its partners documented a much greater variety of life than expected, inclu...

Federal testing for mad cow disease a failure, law review editor says

The U.S. Agriculture Department's mad cow disease-testing program is wholly inadequate and the agency's refusal to let processors do their own testing further undercuts the safety of American beef, a University of Illinois scholar writes. Eating meat from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, can cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal human brain-wast...

Prion find points way to test for human 'mad cow' disease

In the July 7, 2006, issue of the journal Science, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) describe experiments that may soon lead to a test that will enable medical science to estimate how many people are infected with the human form of mad cow disease, which can take as long as 40 years before manifesting itself. Such a blood test could also help preven...

Iowa State researchers improving plastics made from corn and soy proteins

David Grewell picked up the little plastic model of a molecule he keeps in his office. He scrunched the model's folding pieces into a ball. That's about the shape of a soy or corn protein, said Grewell, an Iowa State University assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Then he unfolded the model into a long, straight loop. That's what happens when researchers add some glycer...

Progress made in HIV vaccine development

Researchers have successfully tested two candidate vaccines that may eventually be used together to confer immunity against HIV infection. Their findings are published in the December 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Barney S. Graham, MD, PhD, and colleagues from the National Institutes of Health IH Vaccine Research Center in Maryland, the Fred Hutchin...

Custom-made cancer cell attacks

In his Jan. 23 State of the Union address, President George Bush outlined his plan to reduce the nation's dependency on foreign oil by requiring the production of 35 billion gallons a year of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017, roughly five times the current target set by Congress of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. Among the most promising alternatives are fuels derived from biological m...

New sucker-footed bat discovered in Madagascar

Scientists have discovered a new species of bat that has large flat adhesive organs, or suckers, attached to its thumbs and hind feet. This is a remarkable find because the new bat belongs to a Family of bats endemic to Madagascar--and one that was previously considered to include only one rare species. The new species, Myzopoda schliemanni, occurs only in the dry western forests of Madag...

Madagascan tropical forests return thanks to better management and well-defined ownership

A study published in the May 2nd issue of the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, shows that although loss of tropical dry forests occurs in southern Madagascar, there are also large areas of forests regenerating. The return of forest cover was found to be substantial in the study area, with an overall net increase of 4 % during the period 1993-2000. These dry forests have the highest level of...