UAB

UAB scientists discover the origin of a mysterious physical force

Ever since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to establish the cause of a repulsive force occurring between different electrostatically charged molecules, such as DNA and other biomolecules, when they are very close to each other in aqueous media. This force became know as hydration force. Jordi Faraudo, a researcher for the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelo...

Discoveries by UAB and Florida scientists may help transplanted organs survive longer

Scientists may have found a way to dramatically slow organ transplant rejection by as much as several years. The research team reporte...

Hybrid grass may prove to be valuable fuel source

Giant Miscanthus (Miscanthus x giganteus), a hybrid grass that can grow 13 feet high, may be a valuable renewable fuel source for the future, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say. Stephen P. Long, a professor of crop sciences and of plant biology, recently took that message to Dublin, Ireland, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science sponso...

High-tech tags on marine animals yield valuable data for biologists and oceanographers

Researchers are enlisting seals, sea lions, tunas, and sharks to serve as ocean sensors, outfitting these top predators with electronic tags that gather detailed reports on oceanographic conditions and, in many cases, transmit the data via satellite. The data are proving useful to both biologists and oceanographers, yielding new information about the migrations and behavior of the animals and abo...

UAB researchers confirm HIV-1 originated in wild chimpanzees

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has discovered a crucial missing link in the search for the origin of HIV-1, the virus responsible for human AIDS. That missing link is the natural reservoir of the virus, which the team has found in wild-living chimpanzees in southern Cameroon. The findings provide important clues to how the...

A valuable fly for research into disease

Cancer, drug addiction, neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, immune system defects, visual pathologies, heart disease. A tiny insect, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is providing an excellent model system to unravel these diseases and many others. More than 5,000 researchers worldwide are currently working with this organism and producing results that will have beneficial effects for hea...