A team of researchers at Harvard University have modeled in the laboratory a primitive cell, or protocell, that is capable of building, copying and containing DNA. Since there are no physical…

Would you like a side of food poisoning with that salad? Salmonella can infect plant cells and successfully evade all the defense mechanisms of plants so cleaning the surfaces of raw fruits and…

When patches of red, flaky and itchy skin on newborn mice led rapidly to their deaths, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis looked for the reason why. What they found…

By adding an enzyme to adult stem cells 'in vitro', remarkable results can be booked 'in vivo', say scientists of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Up to now, so-called mesenchymal stem…

With improved resolution, tissue-specific molecular markers and precise timing, a group of scientists say they have possibly overturned a long-standing assumption about the origin of embryonic cells…

In the contentious political debate over embryo stem (ES) cell research, both proponents and opponents begin with the premise that "embryos are destroyed for their cells," as President Bush claims…

How does a stem cell decide what specialized identity to adopt – or simply to remain a stem cell? A new study suggests that the conventional view, which assumes that cells are “instructed” to…

600 million years of evolution has taken two unlikely distant cousins, turkeys and scallops, down very different physical paths from their common ancestor but a motor protein, myosin 2, remains…

A team of scientists has provided, for the first time, a detailed map of how the building blocks of chromosomes, the cellular structures that contain genes, are organized in the fruit fly Drosophila…

It has long been known that type 2 diabetes is linked to obesity, particularly fat inside the belly. Now, researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have found that fat from other areas of the body…