An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has discovered a crucial missing link in the search for the origin of HIV-1, the virus responsible for human AIDS. That missing link is the natural reservoir of the virus, which the team has found in wild-living chimpanzees in southern Cameroon.

The findings provide important clues to how the disease migrated from non-human to human primates, and will be released Thursday (May 25) in Sc

An improved technique for culturing cells, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), may enable new, fundamental insights into the behavior of neuronal cells.

Culturing particular types of cells in isolation is a basic technique for measuring how they respond to various stimuli, testing new drugs, and similar cell biology tasks. Neuronal cells, which make up the central nervous system in mammals, are both particularly important and particularly har

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently added 150 new methods–nicknamed “recipes”–to a database already containing 255 procedures for analyzing specific synthetic polymers using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry.

The recipes provide data critical to the industrial design, manufacture and application of synthetic polymers. They have been collected from the peer-review scientific literature and included in the

For Dr. Sydney Finegold, research is like reading a really good mystery or detective story. “But it is real life and one can see the results in one’s own patients,” he said. “So, one can have great fun while accomplishing worthwhile things.”

With a grant from the Department of Defense, Finegold has taken his passion for research and applied it to a problem that affects civilians as well as injured service members: wound bacteria.

“The flora of wound infections is v

A rare genetic defect that can trigger a host of diseases from type 1 diabetes to alopecia has helped explain the imbalance of immune regulator and killer cells in autoimmune disease.

Mutation in the Aire gene causes APS1, a disease causing two out of three problems – an underactive parathyroid, yeast infection of the skin and/or mucous membrane and adrenal gland insufficiency – by age 5 and up to 16 autoimmune diseases over a lifetime.

The same mutation causes a defec

COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes may be blocked by pain medications such as Advil and Vioxx in a more complex manner than was previously understood, a Queen’s University study has found.

“The results of the study have potential implications for how we classify the commonly used anti-inflammatory and pain drugs for aches, pains, and fever,” says Colin Funk, a professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at Queen’s and Canada Research Chair in Molecular, Cellular and Physiologiocal Medicine.

The researcher Zafira Castaño has discovered that the loss of a protein in the early phases of lung cancer favors tumor growth. This was the conclusion that the Doctor in Biochemistry reached in the dissertation which she defended at the University of Navarra.

In order to perform the study she began with prior studies from her laboratory, which demonstrated that the protein aCP4 appears in the tissue cells that coat the normal lung, and which, nevertheless, are lost in the first phas

Eating fatty food does not appear to increase the risk of skin cancer. A study published today in the open access international journal BMC Cancer contradicts previous research that showed a link between high fat intake and certain types of skin cancer. The results of this latest study suggest that high fat intake might even play a protective role in the development of non-melanoma skin cancer.

Robert Granger and colleagues from the Menzies Research Institute in Hobart, Australia and col

Uterine fibroids affect the health and quality of life of more than six million women in the US every year

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are working on ways to improve the results of a non-surgical method to treat fibroids. They are examining the overall effectiveness of different agents used to destroy uterine fibroids – a discovery that could lead to more answers about the durability of a procedure called Uterine Fibroid Embolization (UFE). I

A Penn State College of Medicine pilot study suggests that a drug used to ease symptoms of alcohol and drug addiction may also bring relief to people with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the intestine that affects an estimated 500,000 Americans.

In the study, patients with diagnosed Crohn’s disease were treated with a low dose of naltrexone, an FDA-approved drug used to ease symptoms of withdrawal from substance abuse, and monitored for improvement o

Researchers funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA) have identified an unsuspected role of a protein named SHP-1 that could constitute a new therapeutic path against Type 2 Diabetes.

Under the direction of professor André Marette (Laval University), Nicole Beauchemin (McGill University), Martin Oliver (McGill University Health Centre) and Katherine Siminovitch (University of Toronto) were part of a Canadian and Am

A major fundraising campaign to extend facilities and clinical research programmes for diabetes in Perth and Kinross receives its local launch at Perth Council Chambers on Tuesday May 30th.

Provost Bob Scott will host the reception for the Perth “People’s Launch” of the Diabetes Research Campaign, which has been launched by the University of Dundee and aims to raise £3 million across Tayside.

A key part of the campaign is to provide state-of-the-art clinical research f

In a recent study, genetically modified cassava plants produced roots that were more than two-and-a-half times the size of normal cassava roots.

The findings could help ease hunger in many countries where people rely heavily on the cassava plant (Manihot esculenta) as a primary food source, said Richard Sayre, the study’s lead author and a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at Ohio State University.

The researchers used a gene from the bacterium E. c

It doesn’t take John Wayne’s deliberate, pigeon-toed swagger or Marilyn Monroe’s famously wiggly sway to judge a person’s gender based on the way they move. People are astonishingly accurate when asked to judge the gender of walking human figures, even when they are represented by 15 small dots of light attached to major joints of the body.
And not only that, when human observers watched the walking motion of a male so-called “point light walker,” they were more sensitive t

New findings in nerve communication

If the chemistry is right … you might remember this

A young Australian scientist has made an important discovery about how brain cells communicate. This finding is central to understanding all brain function – from laying down memory to being able to walk

The groundbreaking research has been published in the latest edition of world-leading journal Nature Neuroscience.

Victor Anggono, a PhD student at the Children&#1

The bacterium that causes bubonic plague would seem unlikely to help medical scientists, but researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have harnessed it to uncover a new regulatory mechanism that inhibits the immune system.

Three species of the Yersinia bacteria, known to cause plague and gastroenteritis, contain a small molecule, called a virulence factor, that the researchers have found modifies host enzymes critical to normal functioning.

“This type of modificati