seek

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...

UCLA scientists transform HIV into cancer-seeking missile

Camouflaging an impotent AIDS virus in new clothes enables it to hunt down metastasized melanoma cells in living mice, reports a UCLA AIDS Institute study in the Feb. 13 online edition of Nature Medicine. The scientists added the protein that makes fireflies glow to the virus in order to track its journey from the bloodstream to new tumors in the animals' lungs. "For the past 20 years, ge...

Researchers seek to discover what really happens when a virus enters the body

A well-respected researcher who is now a chief of an immunology laboratory of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has rocked the boat in the past few years for the experts in the understanding of the autoimmune system. NIH's Polly Matzinger has developed the "danger model," suggesting that the immune system is more concerned with damage detected on the basis of a biological cell's deat...

Hide and seek: Researchers discover a new way for infectious bacteria to enter cells

French scientists have learned how bacterium, found in soil and water, can be transmitted to humans via undercooked and unpasteur...

Retina adapts to seek the unexpected, ignore the commonplace

Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace. The scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature on their finding that this principle of novelty-detection operates in many visual environments. "Appar...

On a wing and a prayer - Alaska researchers seek clues to bird flu

While Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" made many of us uneasy at the sight of amassing gulls years ago, today public health officials around the world are beginning to cast an equally uneasy eye toward migratory birds, especially in Alaska, following recent outbreaks of avian influenza in Southeast Asia and, last week, in Siberia. Alaska is at the intersection of the Asian and North American...

Stem cell study for patients with heart attack damage seeks to regenerate heart muscle

Rush cardiologists are hoping that transplanted stem cells can regenerate damaged heart muscle in those who experience a first heart attack. The study involves an intravenous infusion of adult mesenchymal stem cells from healthy donor bone marrow that might possibly reverse damage to heart tissue. A unique benefit of the stem cell product is that it is given to patients through a standard...

Scientists seek to unwrap the sweet mystery of the sugar coat on bacteria

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a quick and simple way to investigate the sugar coating that surrounds bacteria and plays a role in infection and immunity. The sugars coating bacteria can change very quickly during the course of an infection, cloaking the bacteria from the immune system of their host. Previous techniques for studying the sugars were too slow...

Researchers seek to solve mystery of natural HIV control

An international, multi-institutional research consortium is seeking to discover how a few HIV-infected individuals are naturally able to suppress replication of the virus. The Elite Controller Collaborative Study ( ), the first large-scale haplotype-mapping study in pe...

UVa researchers seek to unlock broccoli's cancer fighting secret

After all these years, mom was right. She knew broccoli was good for you, she just didn't know it was this good. "Everyone knows broccoli is good for you and that it contains compounds known to lessen the occurrence of some types of cancer. We want to know how these compounds work and what their specific targets may be," says Janet V. Cross, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pathology at the U...

Researchers seek to design first treatment for neuroAIDS

Experimental drugs are showing promise against neuroAIDS, the nerve damage caused by HIV infection that lessens many patients' ability to think and move. As evidence of the progress, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center today received a $7 million grant to confirm that two new drug classes can protect the brain from HIV-related nerve damage. Driving their approach is the real...

Scientists seek useful traits in wild cottons

If you have Mom's smile, Dad's eyes and Grandpa's laugh, you might wonder what other traits you picked up from the genealogic fabric of the ol' family tree. "Cotton genetic diversity has narrowed in recent yea...