Life Sciences

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, report using antibodies derived from immune cells from recent human survivors of H5N1 avian influenza to successfully treat H5N1-infected mice as well as protect them from an otherwise lethal dose of the virus. "The possibility of an influenza pandemic, whether sparked by H5N1 or another influenza virus to which humans have no natural immunity, is of serious concern to the global health community," says NIAID Director…

The genome of the organism that produces the world's most lethal toxin is revealed today. This toxin is the one real weapon in the genome of Clostridium botulinum and less than 2 kg - the weight of two bags of sugar - is enough to kill every person on the planet. Very small amounts of the same toxin are used in medical treatments, one of which is known as Botox®. The genome sequence, reported in Genome Research, shows that C. botulinum doesn't have subtle tools to evade our human defences or tricky methods of acquiring resistance to antibiotics. It lives either as a dormant spore or as a…

Thymic nurse cells were given their name because of their intimate relationship with developing T cells (thymocytes) in the thymus. Thymic nurse cells have been reported to take as many as 50 thymocytes into their cell body (see thymocytes inside of a thymic nurse cell in photos, the blue dye stains the nuclei of thymocytes inside of a nurse cell). Whether or not thymic nurse cells have the capacity to "internalize" another cell into itself, and the function of this unique biological phenomenon during T cell development is the focus of studies performed by Dr. Guyden at The City College of…

Restore Earth's energy balance. Feed some astronauts. It could all be possible thanks to a new fungi discovery by Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers. Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth. "The fungal kingdom comprises…

Scientists from the University of California-Davis recently developed a mathematical model of the rate of gene transfer among bacteria in the environment. Researchers believe this new model improves upon existing models by taking into account characteristics of the natural subsurface environments, the typical bacteria hangouts. This model will help scientists to quantify the spread of important bacterial traits. The swapping of genetic material between bacteria leads to bacterial adaptation and evolution; however, bacterial adaptation is a double-edged sword for the environment. While the…

Researchers have known for decades that certain neurodegenerative diseases, such as mad cow disease or its human equivalent, Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease, result from a kind of infectious protein called a prion. Remarkably, in recent years researchers also have discovered non-pathogenic prions that play beneficial roles in biology, and prions even may act as essential elements in learning and memory. But although prions have received a great deal of scrutiny, scientists still don’t understand many of the most fundamental mechanisms of how prions form, replicate and cross from one species to…

XDx, a molecular diagnostics company, today announced its AlloMap® molecular expression test will be the subject of presentations and discussions at the American Transplant Congress 2007. The test, currently used to detect the absence of heart transplant rejection instead of routine invasive heart muscle biopsies, has now been shown to correlate with oxygen saturation levels, cardiac filling pressures, and the electrical properties of the transplanted heart. Also, data from the Lung Allograft Rejection Gene expression Observation (LARGO) study presented at the ATC sessions demonstrate that a…

Plants scavenge nearly every photon of available light energy to produce food. Yet after many years of careful research into its exact mechanisms, some key questions remain about this fundamental biological process that supports all life on earth. The structure of the L and M subunits of the photosynthetic reaction center from Rhodobacter sphaeroides (based on PDB entry 1PCR). The protein is represented in purple, the cofactors are represented in red, blue, black and yellow. Credit: Professor Neal Woodbury, Biodesign Institute at ASU Now, a large research team led by Neal Woodbury, a…

When a cell divides, normally the result is two identical daughter cells. In some cases however, cell division leads to two cells with different properties. This is called asymmetric cell division and plays an important role in embryonic development and the self-renewal of stem cells. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have now worked out the mechanism underlying asymmetric cell division in nematode worms. The study, which is published in the current issue of Cell, reveals that interactions between the mitotic spindle and the cell cortex are crucial for…

What would be the opening chapter of the Kamasutra of plant sex? A good pick would be a description of the numerous ways in which plants arrange their sexual organs: from both sexes in the same flower to sexes separated in different flowers or individuals. One widespread sexual strategy that remains an evolutionary enigma is the production of both male and bisexual flowers in the same plant, which occurs in approximately 4000 species. Male (left) and bisexual (right) flowers in horsenettle (Solanum carolinense). Credit: Mario Vallejo-Marin What is the advantage of producing these redundant…