Microbiology

Scientists at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) say they have discovered that specialized complex sugar molecules (glycans) that anchor cells into place act as tumor suppressors in breast and prostate cancers. Glycans play a critical role in cell adhesion in normal cells and their decrease or loss leads to increased cell migration by invasive cancer cells and metastasis but an increase in expression of the enzyme that produces these glycans, β3GnT1, resulted in a significant reduction in tumor activity. The specialized glycans are capable of binding to laminin and are attached…

Six groups of scientists from the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at the University of York and the Astbury Centre for Structural and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, at the University of Leeds have set out discover how a group of proteins that are highly effective at killing bacteria could hold the key to developing new types of antibiotics. Researchers from the Universities of York and Leeds have been awarded £3.3m from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to find out how a family of proteins known as colicins force their way into…

Scientists at VIB, the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, have successfully introduced genes coding for a variant of the Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, into fruit flies. CMT is one of the most common hereditary disorders of the peripheral nervous system. VIB research – directed by Albena Jordanova, Patrick Callaerts and Vincent Timmerman - shows that the flies recapitulate several symptoms of the human disease. Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a hereditary disorder of the peripheral nervous system that affects 1 in 2,500 people worldwide. Patients suffer from progressive motor impairment,…

Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University say that a  bacterium trapped more than a mile under under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets.  The microbe, which they have called Herminiimonas glaciei in the current issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology,  is small even by bacterial standards - it is 10 to 50 times smaller than E coli. Its small size probably helped it to survive in the liquid veins among ice crystals…

Scientists here have determined that combining bed bugs' own chemical signals with a common insect control agent makes that treatment more effective at killing the bugs.  The researchers found that stirring up the bed bugs by spraying their environment with synthetic versions of their alarm pheromones makes them more likely to walk through agents called desiccant dusts, which kill the bugs by making them highly susceptible to dehydration. A blend of two pheromones applied in concert with a silica gel desiccant dust proved to be the most lethal combination. In the past decade, bed bugs…

Swine flu is a hot topic for many health care related professionals. However, the receptors specific for human, swine or avian influenza viruses are still unclear, because that conflicting results have been published in top scientific journals. One of the papers was published in Nature Medicine recently (Vol. 13, 147-149 (2007)). The main conclusion was "ex vivo cultures of human nasopharyngeal, adenoid and tonsillar tissues can be infected with H5N1 viruses in spite of an appearent lack of these receptors", which was based on Fig. 1e and Fig. 1h of the article. However, my…

On the drive home yesterday afternoon I heard a fascinating story on NPR about an ecosystem near and dear to all humans - our skin. Even if bacteria aren't your thing, the story and the findings are really interesting (and actually could be applicable to a wide host of conditions and diseases). Now, any good microbiology student knows about the vast swath of bacteria that live in and on our bodies. (Have you ever swabbed your belly button and grown the resultant unicellular life on a petri dish? Very cool.) But scientists working on the Human Microbiome Project revealed…

How do you reproduce when you lack the genes for reproduction?   Duke University Medical Center researchers want to know also because that can tell a lot about how yeast infections occur.   In a paper published in Nature, Joseph Heitman, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis in the Duke Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and colleagues report that eight Candida species which have a sexual cycle were missing many of the genes related to reproduction found in other species.    Yeast infections are notoriously hard to treat and yeast…

New research provides exciting genetic insight into a rare syndrome that first appeared in the medical literature in the mid 1800s with the case of Julia Pastrana, the world's most notorious bearded lady. The study, published by Cell Press in the May 21st issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, reveals intriguing molecular clues about the pathogenesis of this mysterious condition that has captured the attention of the public since the Middle Ages. Congenital generalized hypertrichosis (CGH) represents a group of conditions characterized by excessive hair growth over the entire body,…

The swine flu is spreading silently and slowly throughout the World, but it does not make headlines any more -or not yet again, at least. So far, a total of 8565 cases have been reported in five continents, and 73 people have died of it. The last death reported is a 55-years-old teacher in New York, who passed away after a five-day respiratory crisis. This influenza is not as deadly as initially thought, if we look at the numbers: given the above numbers we obtain a death rate of less than one in a hundred -or, to be precise, 8.52+-0.99 per mille, where the uncertainty given is just…