Scientists from Imperial College London have successfully directed mouse stem cells to turn into the type of cells needed for gas exchange in lungs, bringing the prospect of being able to regenerate damaged lung tissue, and even the creation of artificially grown lungs one step closer.
Dr Anne Bishop, from Imperial College Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Centre at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, comments: “This research will make it possible eventually to repair lungs that hav
The problems and issues of sea lice infection in farmed salmon are a major and topical concern for the whole industry. A special issue of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) journal, Pest Management Science to be published in May 2002 reports on the prospect of developing an integrated pest management programme for sea lice control.
Presenting an up-to-date comprehensive view of the sea lice problem the twelve papers in this special issue provide overviews on veterinary medicines, biologi
Are our thoughts made of electricity? Not the familiar kind of electrical signals that travel up and down wires in our computer or nerves in our brain, but the distributed kind of electromagnetic field that permeates space and carries the broadcast signal to the TV or radio.
Professor Johnjoe McFadden from the School of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Surrey believes our conscious mind could be an electromagnetic field. “The theory solves many previously intractable proble
PURAC and Greenomics™ (Plant Research International B.V.) announced the completion of the whole-genome sequencing of a production strain of PURAC that produces high amounts of lactic acid. Greenomics™ conducted the shotgun cloning and high quality sequencing of the genome up to a zero-gap situation. The closed genome is accompanied by an automated annotation and a functional classification of all the genes by bioinformatics tools.
The positive results obtained so far has encouraged PURAC to
Physicians have long marveled at the body’s ability to heal itself. Over time, breaks, tears, burns and bruises can often disappear sans medical intervention. Less well-understood are the similarly extraordinary repairs that take place on the molecular level, in DNA. To that end, findings announced today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may prove insightful. According to the report, researchers have found that a protein known as ATR appears to sense damage to DNA and touch off
Of the estimated 10,000 to 100,000 microbial species that inhabit our planet, scientists can only coax a few thousand to grow in the laboratory. As a result, efforts to categorize the vast diversity of microbes are lagging far behind attempts to classify plants, animals and insects. Now a report published in the current issue of the journal Science suggests that some of these so-called uncultivable microorganisms might not be so out of reach after all.
Tammi Kaeberlein, Kim Lewis and Klava
A research team jointly involving the IRD, the CEA and the CNRS has very recently found phytochromes in a strain of nitrogen-fixing bacterium, Bradyrhizobium (1), symbiont on certain tropical leguminous plants (the Aeschynomene). Techniques of molecular biology, biophysics and biochemistry revealed that the newly-discovered phytochrome has an essential role as regulator of the bacterium’s photosystem synthesis. An identical function was shown in the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris
A model of a system for growing plants to plan biological experiments in space has just left the company of ROVSING, in Ballerup near Copenhagen, on its way to ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands.
The full name of this experiment reference model is European Modular Cultivation System Experiment Reference Model (EMCS ERM). This will be used at ESTEC to plan and carry out experiments for growing plants in space. Then in 2003 the EMCS Flight Model will
Authors of a research letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET conclude that there is no evidence to support the belief that sexual intercourse too soon or two long after ovulation is associated with an increased risk of birth defects and Down’s syndrome.
For many years, the ageing of gametes as a result of prolonged retention in the female reproductive tract before fertilisation has been circumstantially associated with major birth defects. Joe Leigh Simpson and colleagues from Baylor Coll
Scientists have long toyed with the idea of putting to work a special class of biological catalysts, called ribozymes, as therapeutic agents. These molecular scissors would harness the activities of overly active genes that contribute to diseases like cancer by cutting their immediate products, messenger RNAs, into unusable pieces. The advantage of this approach, is that these molecules can be made to recognize very specific targets. This is reported in this month issue of EMBO reports.
Up u
The genome sequence of Streptomyces coelicolor , one of the family of common soil bacteria that produce more than two thirds of the world’s antibiotic medicines, will be published in the journal Nature this week.
Streptomyces are almost ubiquitous in the soils and are responsible for its familiar ‘earthy’ smell. The genome data, collected by British scientists from the John Innes Centre and The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is already being used in research that will help de
A revolutionary method for detecting which human embryos are most likely to develop successfully to the stage at which they implant in the womb has been developed by scientists at the University of York and clinicians at Leeds General Infirmary.
The research has been funded by the Medical Research Council.
The discovery, if confirmed in clinical trials, could bring new hope for many couples undergoing fertility treatment since current failure rates are high. One of the problems is that e
In order to function properly, living organisms need to eliminate defective cells. This rule is however not always abided by, as evidenced by cancer cells which no longer carry out the tasks originally set for them and yet continue to proliferate, as though they were ” ignoring ” commands from their environment. Cancer can thus be defined, inter alia, as an ailment affecting signal transduction.
A team working at the Institut Curie (Inserm Unit 528) have been looking into information-con
Fossil plants form new branch in flower family tree.
Fossils recently plucked from rocks in China are the first representatives of a hitherto unknown group of flowering plants, say their discoverers Ge Sun of Jilin University and colleagues 1 .
They also add to growing evidence that flowering plants, which now dominate the land, originally emerged from the water.
The researchers call the group Archaefructaceae. Its members probably flourished in lake
A University of Ulster researcher has discovered a new population of cave dwelling crocodiles, never before seen outside their Saharan habitat.
PhD student Tara Shine discovered the cave dwelling crocodiles while living in the remote African country of Mauritania as part of a two and a half year volunteer project.
Previously unknown, except by local tribespeople, the crocodiles live in burrows and caves throughout the dry season and periods of drought – a phenomenon never
The scientists from I.P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have investigated the intellectual abilities of chimpanzees in comparison with the children from a nursery school in Koltushy near St. Petersburg. They asked both to build the pyramids of cubes of different size. The children with the retention of speech development aged from 2 to 7 and two chimpanzees, female (aged 7) and male (aged 11) ones, took part in the experiment. The children and the apes were shown a pyra
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