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Genome of deadly amoeba shows surprising complexity, evidence of lateral gene transfer

The genome sequence of the parasitic amoeba Entamoeba histolytica, a leading cause of severe diarrheal disease in developing countries, includes an unexpectedly complex repertoire of sensory genes as well as a variety of bacterial-like genes that contribute to the organism's unique biology. The report, which appears in the February 24 issue of Nature, presents the first genome-wide study...

Scientists seek answers on what activates deadly anthrax spores

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and three other institutions are setting out to find what activates the spores in anthrax, the deadly bacterial infection that is back in the news. "A key aspect of anthrax spore biology concerns the germination process through which the dormant spore becomes a reproductive, disease-causing bacterium," explained Al Claiborne, Ph.D...

U of M researcher examines newly emerging deadly disease

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have identified a newly emerging illness, named staphylococcal purpura fulminans. The disease begins as a respiratory tract infection, which then is infected by Staphylococcus aureus. The infection then moves to the lungs, making superantigens (bacterial toxins that activate large numbers of T cells), often leading to death due to hypertension and shock....

'Smart drug' targets deadly brain cancer

A study led by Mayo Clinic researchers and conducted by the North Central Cancer Treatment Group (NCCTG) reports that a new "smart" drug treatment for an incurable form of recurrent brain cancer slowed tumor growth in more than one-third of the 65 adult patients who tried it. The same research team also developed a screening technique to help predict which patients will respond best to this treat...

Shark attack worries? Driving to the beach is more deadly

Which is more likely to happen - you being in a car wreck or being bitten by a shark? Those who answered that cars are greater killers win a free trip to the beach. It's really no contest, says a Texas A&M University professor. Your chances of being in a wreck are far greater than being a shark's lunch, says John McEachran, a professor of wildlife and fishery sciences who has studied...

Unusual antibiotics show promise against deadly 'superbugs'

Altered protein could help deliver drugs and shape the growth of engineered tissueCollagen often pops up in beauty products and supermodel lips. But by mating collagen with a molecular hitchhiker, materials scientists at Johns Hopkins hope to create some important medical advances. The researchers have found a simple new way to modify collagen, paving the way for better infection-fighting bandage...

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...

U of M researchers discover genetic key to treating deadly fungal infections

University of Minnesota researchers have discovered how a prevalent fungal pathogen that causes 10,000 deaths per year in the United States overcomes the effects of antifungal drugs by duplicating a section of one of its chromosomes. Candida albicans, a type of yeast present in 80 percent of humans, is usually harmless. In otherwise healthy people, it can cause mild oral and vaginal infe...

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...

Three deadly parasite genomes sequenced

Covering ship hulls with artificial shark skin could help ships sailing smoothly. The growth of marine organisms such as barnacles on ship hulls is a major cause of increased energy costs in the naval industry. Shark skin offers a structural design that prevents this so called 'bio-fouling'. Ralph Liedert from the University of Applied Sciences, Bremen, Germany, is presenting his work on t...

Researchers report breakthrough against world’s deadliest viruses

Scientists from the Public Health Agency of Canada - with assistance from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - have developed vaccines against the Ebola and Marburg viruses that have been shown to be effective in non-human primates. In a study published in this month's Nature Medicine, Canadian researchers Dr. Heinz Feldmann and Dr. Steven Jones of PHAC's Nati...

US/African project deciphers deadly parasite genome

An innovative North-South research collaboration has culminated in a study published in this week's Science that provides molecular clues to help develop new ways to treat or prevent East Coast fever. The disease, which kills a million cattle a year in East and Central Africa, has had a devastating impact on rural areas ?such as Maasai tribal communities in Kenya ?where cattle play a cruc...

Emerging staph strains found to be increasingly deadly and deceptive

A study of how the immune system reacts to strains of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria--emerging strains that sicken otherwise healthy people, or so-called "community-acquired" infections--has shown for the first time that these strains are more deadly and better at evading human immune defenses than more common S. aureus strains that originate in hospitals and other health-car...

Life in deadly conditions

Max Planck researchers sequence the genome of a microbiological master of adaptationArchaea, small single-celled organisms, are particularly interesting for scientists because they are able to live under extreme environmental conditions, for instance under high salt concentrations, high pH-values, or high temperatures. Nature's masters of adaptation, they are model organisms from which researcher...

UCLA discovery will aid in treatment of patients with a deadly brain cancer

Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer have identified key characteristics in certain deadly brain tumors that make them 51 times more likely to respond to a specific class of drugs than tumors in which the molecular signature is absent. The discovery of the telltale molecular signature ?the expression of a mutant protein and the presence of a tumor suppressor protein called PTEN ?will allow...

Researchers develop new method to help find deadly malaria parasite's Achilles heel

The most deadly malaria parasite has protein 'wiring' that differs markedly from the cellular circuitry of other higher organisms, a finding which could lead to the development of antimalarial drugs that exploit that difference. Researchers at UCSD have discovered that the single-cell parasite responsible for an estimated 1 million deaths per year worldwide from malaria has protein "wiring" that...

'Good' bacteria could save patients from infection infection by deadlier ones

Can it be that the stress on the use of antiseptics and antibiotics in hospitals is actually putting patients at a greater risk of suffering fatal bacterial infection? Yes, argues Mark Spigelman, a visiting professor at the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Medicine. Prof. Spigelman points to a recen...

Potential vaccine developed for deadly leishmaniasis disease

Development of a fundamentally new "candidate," or potential, vaccine for visceral leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that kills about 60,000 people annually, is reported in the current issue of . Spread by the bite of infected female sand flies, visceral leishmaniasis infects about 500,000 people annually, with the majority of cases occurring in India, Bangladesh, Ne...

Genomics-based vaccine could prevent deadly cattle disease

Every year, East Coast fever destroys the small farmer's dream of escaping poverty in Africa. Killing more than a million cattle and costing some $200 million annually, this tick-borne disease rages across a dozen countries in eastern and central Africa. Now, an international team of scientists has taken the first major step toward a vaccine to prevent East Coast fever. Their work, published in t...

Scientists reveal how deadly toxin hijacks cells

Scientists have pinpointed exactly how botulinum neurotoxin A - a potential agent of biological warfare and one of the most lethal toxins known to man - is able to sneak into cells. The finding is crucial for the development of new treatments against botulism, a paralytic illness caused by the toxin more commonly known as botox. As small amounts of botox are also known to alleviate many m...

Advanced genomics and proteomics improve the diagnosis and treatment of a deadly lung disease

A team of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists has peeled back some of the mystery of how cells are able to turn off genes selectively to control critical events of development. The new insights arise from the first clear molecular images of the structure of Dicer, an enzyme that enables cells to dissect genetic material precisely. The finding, which is reported in the January...

Scientists develop a way to make the deadliest toxin known even more toxic

According to the study, the molecules bind to specific sites on the neurotoxin protein, increasing protease activity and enhancing the toxin's effect. In some cases, the study noted, the activation power of the new molecules was as much as fourteen-fold, the greatest increase in activation ever reported for a protease; before this study, a two-fold activation of a protease was referred to as a st...

Plant-derived vaccines safeguard against deadly plague

Through an innovative feat of plant biotechnology and vaccine design, researchers in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University have successfully turned tobacco plants into vaccine production factories to combat the deadliest form of plague. The vaccine elicits a protective immune response in guinea pigs. The results are considered to be a milestone in the future development of a new vac...

Anti-inflammatory drug's potentially deadly side effect found to be rare

Scientists have completed an extensive study of more than 3,000 patients who received a promising anti-inflammatory drug, natalizumab, that was linked to three cases of a serious brain infection in large clinical trials halted in early 2005. The new study found no new cases of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) and confirmed the three previously identified cases of PML associ...

Experimental vaccine protects mice against deadly 1918 flu virus

Federal scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against the killer 1918 influenza virus. They also have created a technique for identifying antibodies that neutralize this virus, a tool that could help contain future pandemic flu strains. These findings are important, the researchers say, to understanding and preventing the recurrence of the H1N1 influenza virus that caused the 191...

Stanford discovery may help predict when toxoplasma can be deadly

Toxoplasma is arguably the most successful animal parasite on earth: It infects hundreds of species of warm-blooded animals, most notably half of humanity. Its unusual ability to overcome the numerous challenges of infecting and reproducing inside such a wide range of creatures has long intrigued scientists, and now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified t...

A fisheye view of the deadliest breast cancer

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is the deadliest form of the disease, with fewer than half of those diagnosed today having a five-year prognosis for survival. To find out what drives this most aggressive of human breast cancers, and to rapidly screen for drugs that might stop IBC, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have come up with an unlikely yet extremely promis...

'Conversation stoppers' fight deadly bacterial infections

The study, which was directed by Scripps Research Professor Benjamin Cravatt, Ph.D., is being published in the September 8 issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The new study describes a pathway-different than the one previously suggested-for the biosynthesis of neurotransmitter lipids, N-acyl ethanolamines (NAEs), which include the endogenous cannabinoid ("endocannabinoid") ananda...

Researchers identify new weapon to fight deadly bacterial sepsis

One of the most dangerous risks of contracting a serious bacterial infection is that the victim may develop sepsis--an overreaction by the immune system causing destructive inflammation throughout the body, often leading to heart and other organ failure and death. Even the best hospital intensive care units may be helpless to save patients stricken by severe sepsis. According to a 2003 study by E...

Natural protein stops deadly human brain cancer in mice

Scientists from Johns Hopkins and from the University of Milan have effectively proven that they can inhibit lethal human brain cancers in mice using a protein that selectively induces positive changes in the activity of cells that behave like cancer stem cells. The report is published this week in Nature. The most common type of brain cancer-glioblastoma-is marked by the presence of these...

Brown team finds crucial protein role in deadly prion spread

A single protein plays a major role in deadly prion diseases by smashing up clusters of these infectious proteins, creating the "seeds" that allow fatal brain illnesses to quickly spread, new Brown University research shows. The findings are exciting, researchers say, because they might reveal a way to control the spread of prions through drug intervention. If a drug could be made that inh...

Cornell lab confirms deadly fish virus spreading to new species

A lethal fish virus in the Great Lakes and neighboring waterways is approaching epidemic proportions, according to Paul Bowser, Cornell professor of aquatic animal medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine. The viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV), which causes anemia and hemorrhaging in fish, has now been identified in 19 species and poses a potential threat to New York’s $1.2 billion...

Dealing deadly cancers a knockout punch

New scientific evidence is helping to build a compelling case for oncolytic viruses as a first-line and adjunctive treatment for many cancers. Reovirus, a non-pathogenic virus under development at Calgary, Alberta-based Oncolytics Biotech, has shown powerful anti-cancer activity against cultured tumor cells, in animal models, and in human clinical trials. Oncolytics' proprietary reoviru...

Simple home spit test to spot deadly pre-eclampsia

A simple spit test designed to detect pre-eclampsia in the early stages is being trialed in a UK hospital, reports Cath O'Driscoll in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. The test, which is designed to be used at home, will allow mums-to-be to check for themselves whether they are at risk of the condition, which can be symptomless in the early stages but kills 1000 babies in the UK...

Genome of Clostridium botulinum reveals the background to world's deadliest toxin

The genome sequence sho...