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Quantum Dots Research Leads to New Knowledge about Protein Binding in Plants

UC Riverside researchers from the Departmentsof Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering andBotany and Plant Sciences have worked together to discover a way toutilize to uncover new knowledge about the binding of a protein at the growingpollen tube tip. This protein plays a critic...

Study Links Ebola Outbreaks To Animal Carcasses

All recent Ebola virus outbreaks in humans in forests between Gabon and the Republic of Congo were the result of handling infected wild animal carcasses, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and its regional partners. Appearing in the February edition of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the study found that many animal carcasses tested for Ebola between 2001 an...

U-M scientist to talk about tissue engineering at AAAS

Scientists have a pretty good handle on how to teach human cells to do tricks in a laboratory---things like getting soft cells from the mouth's lining to form bone. But in the real world, accomplishing such feats is more complex. Regenerating the jaw bone of a person undergoing radiation therapy for cancer means managing the constant bacteria bath of a human mouth as well as compensating...

Improved Outcomes Releases GeneLinker(TM) Gold and Platinum Version 4.6

Improved Outcomes Software (IOS) todayannounced the release of GeneLinker(TM) Gold and Platinum 4.6, newversions of the award-winning Gene Expression and Proteomics AnalysisSoftware products."The new releases are focused primarily on importing and analyzingprotein biomarker data, a high priority for many of our customers. Forexample, we have integrated the Protein Biomarker Package into the...

Jefferson Virologists Coax HIV Out of Hiding

When researchers came up with the powerfulcocktail of anti-HIV drugs known as highly active antiretroviraltherapy (HAART), they hoped they had found a way to finally rid thebody of the virus. But they were wrong. The virus instead goes intohiding, dormant and practically undetectable in the body ?andimpervious to attack. While HAART manages to keep the virus at bay,it’s still quite capable...

BRCA1 causes ovarian cancer through indirect, biochemical route

Mutated BRCA1 genes cause ovarian cancer indirectly, by interfering with the biochemical signals one ovarian cell sends to another, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Their work is being published in the March 29 issue of the journal Current Biology.</p...

UCSD researchers maintain stem cells without contaminated animal feeder layers

The growth and maintenance of human embryonic stem cells in the absence of contaminated animal products has been demonstrated by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine researchers in the Whittier Institute, La Jolla, California. Published in the April 2005 issue of the journal Stem Cells, the study shows that laboratory culture media enriched by a human protein calle...

South America's vast pantanal wetland may become next everglades, UNU experts warn

South America's giant Pantanal wetlands, one of the world's most bio-diverse ecosystems, is at growing risk from intensive peripheral agricultural, industrial and urban development ?problems expected to be compounded by climate change, United Nations University experts warn. Covering more than 165,000 square kilometers ?an area roughly equal to Florida ?in the heart of South America, the P...

In the migratory marathon, parasitized monarchs drop out early

A little-stud...

Vampire bats keep out of trouble by running

Although most people think of bats as stealthy mammals that flit about in the night sky, at least one species has evolved a terrestrial trot never before seen in bats, according to a recent Cornell University study. It's known that the common vampire bats of Central and South America behave much more like four-legged terrestrial mammals, in that they like to walk around on the ground; othe...

US life expectancy about to decline, researchers say

A team of researchers led by University of Illinois at Chicago professor S. Jay Olshansky is predicting a decline in life expectancy in the United States later this century. Th...

Surprising findings reported about iron overload

UAB and international scientists studying iron-overload disorders have made the unexpected discovery that Asians and Pacific Islanders have the highest levels of iron in their blood of all racial/ethnic groups who were screened. Individuals who develop hemochromatosis/iron overload absorb an excessive amount of iron from food and supplements ingested. The abnormality affects many people wo...

Fleshing out the genome

Genomics, the study of all the genetic sequences in living organisms, has leaned heavily on the blueprint metaphor. A large part of the blueprint, unfortunately, has been unintelligible, with no good way to distinguish a bathroom from a boardroom, to link genomic features to cell function. A national consortium of scientists led by BIATECH, a Seattle based non-profit research center, and...

Alaskan puzzles, monitoring provide insight about North Pacific salmon runs

The University of Washington Alaska Salmon Program, the world's longest-running effort to monitor salmon and their ecosystems, has received nearly $2.4 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand its sampling scope and sophistication. The Alaska-based program has applications for Pacific salmon all along the West Coast, providing insights into the fluctuating fortunes of s...

Canadian youth 4th highest in international obesity study

Canadian youth rank fourth-highest on the obesity scale in a new international study of adolescents from 34 countries, says co-author Dr. Ian Janssen, a professor in Queen's University's School of Physical & Health Education and Department of Community Health & Epidemiology. And sedentary behaviour ?like watching television ?was strongly correlated with being overweight, he adds.</...

Youth With HIV Take More Risks After New Meds Introduced

Teens with HIV are having more risky sex with more partners than their counterparts did in the years before powerful new medications for HIV were introduced in 1996, according to a new report in the American Journal of Health Behavior. A group of HIV-positive youth studied between 1999 and 2000 reported having more sexual partners, more unprotected sex and more drug use than HIV-positive...

Medical whistleblowers speak out

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was "the single greatest obstacle to doing anything effective" about Vioxx, said FDA drug safety officer David Graham at an unprecedented roundtable of medical whistleblowers sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Government Accountability Project. In comments that echoed his now infamous testimony to the US Senate Finance Commi...

First North American Encapsulated Islet Transplant without Long-term Immune Suppression into a Patient with Type 1 Diabetes

Biologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered how the plagues of the Middle Ages have made around 10% of Europeans resistant to HIV. Scientists have known for some time that these individuals carry a genetic mutation (known as CCR5-delta32) that prevents the virus from entering the cells of the immune system but have been unable to account for the high levels of the gene in Scandinavi...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

It's a cloudless July afternoon in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, and ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell is scanning the horizon for elephants. "It's so fantastic here," she says. "We're constantly seeing elephants, rhinos, zebras, ostriches--it's the Garden of Eden." A research associate in the Stanford University School of Medicine, O'Connell-Rodwell has come to one of Afric...

At long last, scientists figure out how plants grow

It has been one of the great mysteries in plant science. In this week's Nature, Indiana University Bloomington biologists Mark Estelle, Nihal Dharmasiri and Sunethra Dharmasi...

Multiple-drug resistant gene expression pattern predicts treatment outcome for pediatric leukemia

A new study is providing scientists with a better understanding of why some pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients fail to respond to treatment even when existing clinical predictive criteria point towards a positive treatment outcome. The research, published in the April issue of Cancer Cell, is likely to facilitate development of new strategies to combat drug resistance and treat...

South African Tribunal Asks For Damages Estimates in GSK AIDS Drug Case

A landmark South African legal complaint against British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) over its AIDS drug pricing and policies in that country will proceed following an order late last week by South Africa's Competition Tribunal that will allow the complaint to go forward. GSK has sought outright dismissal of the case; however, the Competition Tribunal issued an order last week giving the comp...

Taking the piste out of Alpine vegetation

Major changes need to be made to the way ski pistes are managed if delicate alpine plants are to be protected, ecologists have warned. According to new research published today in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, machine grading and artificial snow production is causing significant changes in the number and type of plant species in the European Alps. Sonja Wipf...

Measuring Enzymes At End Of Cancer Pathway Predicts Outcome Of Tarceva, Taxol

Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have developed a way to test whether the new targeted therapy Tarceva and the widely used chemotherapy drug Taxol are effectively killing tumor cells. They say that with further refinement, the test may make it possible to accurately assess whether patients are responding to these agents, as well as potentially others, within day...

FDA Warns About Antipsychotic Drugs and Elderly

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today issued a public health advisory to alert health care providers, patients, and patient caregivers to new safety information concerning an unapproved (i.e., "off-label") use of certain drugs called "atypical antipsychotic drugs." These drugs are approved for the treatment of schizophrenia and mania, but clinical studies of these drugs to treat behavioral...

Two chemicals boost immune cells' ability to fight HIV without gene therapy

A UCLA AIDS Institute study has discovered that two chemical compounds may help the immune systems of HIV-infected persons fight the disease without invasive gene therapy. Presented March 5 at the 2005 Palm Springs Symposium on HIV/AIDS, the new research demonstrates that the new chemicals activate telomerase -- a protein that boosts immune cells' ability to divide, enabling them to continue dest...

Important discovery about second most fatal cancer

An international team of medical scientists has made an important advance in our understanding of the second most fatal form of cancer in the industrialized world. Professor Jeremy R. Jass, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Gastrointestinal Pathology at McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues in Australia and Japan have shown that in some cases colorectal cancer can be inherited. The new...

Alarm pheromone causes aphids to sprout wings

Chemical communication within insect species is often much more sophisticated than expected. When aphids are attacked by predators such as ladybird beetles, they release an alarm pheromone, (E)-â-farnesene, that has long been known to cause other aphids to walk around or drop from the plant. In a paper soon to appear in Ecology Letters, researchers at the University and Max-Planck-Institut...

New Species of Coral Discovered Off Southern California

A working group of virologists headed by Professor Hans-Georg Kräusslich at Heidelberg University Hospitals, jointly with Professor Hanswalter Zentgraf, Division of Applied Tumor Virology of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ), have been the first to label Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV) for visual investigations without inhibiting the functional charac...

Survey reveals women and doctors aren't talking about HPV

Eighty-eight percent of women rely on their healthcare providers to learn about gynecological issues, yet only 19 percent said their doctor has talked to them about cervical cancer and its cause - the human papillomavirus (HPV) - according to a new survey released by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP). HPV is extremely common, affecting an estimated 80 percent of sexually...

Hopkins AIDS experts issue warning about global efforts to provide drug therapies

Johns Hopkins infectious disease specialists who have spent more than two decades leading efforts to combat HIV and AIDS worldwide are warning that limited international relief supplies of antiretroviral therapies currently being distributed in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean will not get to those who can least afford to pay for them. In an article appearing in the American Journal of Publi...

UN pours polio vaccine into Yemen amid outbreak

As Yemen geared up for an end-of-month nationwide campaign to immunize all children under 5 against a fast-moving paralytic poliovirus outbreak, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said it was shipping in 6 million doses of polio vaccine. In addition, 10 experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) are working with national coordinators and helping to train vaccinators and sup...

Poaching, logging, and outbreaks of Ebola threaten central African gorillas and chimpanzees

Experts call for $30 million action plan to save mankind's closest relatives An action plan drafted by more than 70 primatologists and other experts who met in B...

New Vaccine To Be Used For First Time In Polio Outbreak Response

Eighteen new cases of polio have today been announced in Yemen, bringing the reported total number associated with an outbreak in the country to 22. Yemen had been polio-free since disease surveillance began in 1996 - a genetic investigation is ongoing to determine the precise origin of the outbreak. Experts fear that the number of cases will rise in the immediate future. Teams of WHO and...

Monkeypox mystery: New research may explain why 2003 outbreak in the US wasn't deadly

An outbreak of 72 cases of monkeypox in the United States during the summer of 2003 didn't produce a single fatality, even though the disease usually kills 10 percent of those infected. In this month's issue of Virology, researche...

Drug resistant avian influenza viruses more common in Southeast Asia than North America

Analysis of a key protein in different subtypes of avian flu viruses shows that resistance to the antiviral drug amantadine in H5N1 occurs worldwide, but is especially prevalent in China, according to St. Jude Resistance to the antiviral drug amantadine is spreading more rapidly among avian influenza viruses of H5N1 subtype in Southeast Asia than in North America, according to the study d...

Few clues about African ancestry to be found in mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA may not hold the key to your origins after all. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that fewer than 10% of African American mitochondrial DNA sequences analysed can be matched to mitochondrial DNA from one single African ethnic group. There has been a growing interest in the use of mitochondrial DNA to trace maternal ancestries, and several com...

Tulane researcher reports on origin of deadly fever outbreak

Bats or other cave dwelling animals may have been responsible for the deadly 1998?000 outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever among gold miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to an article in the Aug. 31, 2006, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Daniel G. Bausch, associate professor of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical...

Expanding forests darken the outlook for butterflies, study shows

Changing environmental conditions in the Canadian Rockies are stifling the mating choices of butterflies in the region, say University of Alberta researchers. Smaller and less abundant alpine meadows--largely the result of human activities--are diminishing the alpine butterfly gene pool, creating a pattern that could lead to the butterflies being less able to survive, said Dr. Jens Roland,...

South Africa still debating how to tackle HIV/AIDS when 5 million are infected

A national conference in South Africa was dominated this week by the continuing debate over HIV/AIDS drugs. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang repeated yet again that drugs were not the only way to fight HIV/AIDS, and that eating habits were also important. After previously denying links between HIV and AIDS, the South African government began providing AIDS drugs in clinics last ye...