How does the body go about generating blood vessels? This question has been studied by a research team from Uppsala University in collaboration with colleagues from the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The findings show that a relatively unknown protein, CLIC4, forms blisters that later develop into the hollow interior of the vessel. The study is being published in the December 23 issue of Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The scientists in the project mapped what protei

A EU-sponsored project has developed a suite of tools that will enable biotech companies to mine through vast quantities of data created by modern life-science labs to find the nuggets of genetic gold that lie within.

The BioGrid project brought together six partners from the UK, Germany, Cyprus and The Netherlands to address one of the key problems facing the life sciences today.

“How to integrate the huge volume of disparate data – on gene expression, protein interactio

Rutgers geneticists have reported groundbreaking research on the genetics of fertility. They have discovered two genes, aptly named egg-1 and egg-2, required for fertilization to take place. The proteins encoded by these genes are similar to low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors, known from cholesterol and fat metabolism but never before specifically implicated in fertilization.

One in six couples is experiencing fertility problems worldwide, and people are asking why. This is a

Seeking to catch an arms-race maneuver in action, researchers have uncovered new evidence to explain how bacteria in the process of infecting a plant can shift molecular gears by excising specific genes from its genome to overcome the host plant’s specific defenses.

Throughout evolution – in the wild and in crops cultivated by humans – plants have developed systems for resisting the attack of microbial pathogens, while these microbes themselves have depended on their abi

A sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies

A team of researchers has proposed new limits on the time when the most recent common ancestor of humans and their closest ape relatives — the chimpanzees — lived. Scientists at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of this split between 5 and 7 million years ago — a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies, which hav

Experts in ancient DNA from McMaster University (Canada) have teamed up with genome researchers from Penn State University (USA) for the investigation of permafrost bone samples from Siberia. The project also involved paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History (USA) and researchers from Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The researchers’ report on the first genomic sequences from a woolly mammoth will be published on 22 December 2005 by the journal Science on

Neuroscientist Takes Issue with Antidepressants for Children

The question of whether SSRI antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac), are safe and more effective than dummy pills for treating child and adolescent depression (CAD) remains highly contentious, says Dr Amir Raz, Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University and Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, in New York City.

Regional Governments May be Reluctant to Report Outbreaks

Federal countries distribute power across central and regional governments, and this division of power can hinder national and international efforts to control infectious disease outbreaks, says a team of researchers in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.

“Canada’s experience with SARS outlines the challenges of such constitutional division of powers when it comes to managing public health crises,” says the team,

Tuberculosis is an extremely insidious disease. The pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis can rest undetected many years in the human body, and infected people show no symptoms – until the disease suddenly breaks out. Worldwide, the number of deaths related to tuberculosis amounts to 2 million per year, eight million new infections occur annually. Dangerous centers of infection are, for instance, third-world countries or prisons in countries of the former Soviet Union. In some of the prisons, one hu

A team of ophthalmologists at the University of Liverpool has become the first in the world to image geodesic structures – called CLANs – inside the human body.

Professor Ian Grierson and his colleagues have found that the shape of each CLAN is similar to the design of the framework forming the roofs over the Eden Project and the courtyard at the British Museum.

CLANs is an acronym for Cross-linked Action Networks. They are formed from the components which maintain the str

According to a well-known proverb “one apple a day keeps the doctor away“, suggesting that the healthy components which occur in fruits and vegetables can prevent diet-related diseases. Unfortunately, fresh fruits and vegetables are not always available and frozen food is not really handy either. What is less complicated, however, is dried food. During the past two years scientists from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and the Technische Universität Dresden/Germany as well as the Zittauer

A key toxin associated with whooping cough helps the germs resist the human immune system and infect vaccinated populations. Discovery of this resistance mechanism could lead to potential new treatments for the disease, according to researchers at Penn State.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the germ Bordetella pertussis. Whooping cough can occur at any age but is generally considered a childhood disease marked by severe spells of coug

The La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology (LIAI) is making significant strides in the battle against the avian “bird” flu, with pre-clinical trials under way on a potential treatment conceived by one of its scientists. The Institute, a not-for-profit organization whose cutting-edge research focuses on infectious diseases and other immune system disorders, is also developing information for a “universal” flu vaccine, as well as researching a needle-free vaccine that would treat various influenz

A revolutionary portable brain scanner under development could aid the treatment, and in some cases help save the lives, of premature and newborn babies in intensive care.

By providing vital information about brain function at the cot side, the scanner avoids the need to move critically ill babies to conventional scanning facilities, which may involve sedating them and has a degree of risk. The data produced by the new scanner can be used to diagnose and assess conditions such a

Dutch otolaryngologist Marein van der Torn hoped to develop a prosthesis that would improve the voice of people who had lost their vocal cords. He investigated the possibilities of a new type of voice prosthesis that produces vocal sound. The concept could be useful for female patients with a very weak voice: it would strengthen their voice and enable it to achieve a female pitch again. However, various practical problems need to be solved before the voice prosthesis can be used.

Sometim

Deciphering a paradox of evolution

Biologists at Georgia Tech have provided scientific support for a controversial hypothesis that has divided the fields of evolutionary genomics and evolutionary developmental biology, popularly known as evo devo, for two years. Appearing in the December 2005 issue of Trends in Genetics, researchers find that the size and complexity of a species’ genome is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but can result as simply a consequence of a reductio