Researchers have identified an enzyme crucial to the malaria parasite’s invasion of red blood cells, according to a study in the open-access journal, PLoS Pathogens.

“The most exciting practical implication of this work is that it identifies a potential drug target that is quite different from anything that is targeted by existing antimalarial drugs,” Blackman says. “This is very important, since it is widely agreed that the best way to prevent the appearance of drug resist

Using a tiny flatworm best known for its extraordinary ability to regenerate lost tissue, researchers have identified a gene that controls the ability of stem cells to differentiate into specialized cells. The gene encodes a protein that is most similar to the protein PIWI, an important regulator of stem cells in organisms ranging from plants to humans.

The replacement of tissue lost to injury or shed during the body’s normal activities is essential for the survival of most

When smedwi-2 gene is silenced, regeneration stopped in planarians

Researchers at the University of Utah have discovered that when a gene called smedwi-2 is silenced in the adult stem cells of planarians, the quarter-inch long worm is unable to carry out a biological process that has mystified scientists for centuries: regeneration.

The study published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science was led by Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator

Cancer of the pancreas is the number five in the list of deaths due to cancers in Spain and the third causing deaths due to digestive tumour. Moreover, the survival rate for patients with which it is possible to carry out a complete resection of the tumour does not reach 25% within five years. This is because, although good localised control, metastasis occurs, the principal cause of death in cancer of the pancreas.

Over the last few years the approach to this disease has improved considerab

Exercise is good for your physical health. We have known this for a long time. We also know that physical activity is good for the brain and alleviates depression and stress. What’s more, training improves both memory and learning capacities. On the other hand, exaggerated exercise, when the body doesn’t have a chance to recover, has a negative effect, with fewer brain cells as a result. This is shown in a dissertation from the Sahlgrenska Academy at Göteborg University in Sweden. Moderation

A team of British scientists at Manchester and Lancaster Universities has turned established thinking on its head in a bid to understand the serious and often deadly condition, hydrocephalus, commonly known as ‘water on the brain’.

A simple dietary supplement taken during pregnancy could prevent the brain defect resulting from hydrocephalus, revolutionary research suggests.

Now, parents of children suffering from the condition in the United States have stumped up the m

Childhood infection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is often asymptomatic, while the same infection in adolescents and adults causes infectious mononucleosis (IM). Liisa Selin and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Medical School now show how, in a strange twist of immunological karma, T cells specific to a previously encountered virus (such as the flu) may come back to haunt you, by overzealously responding to a subsequent, unrelated viral infection like EBV, thereby increasing the

Saint Louis University influenza researcher comments in Nov. 24 issue

An article by Robert Belshe, M.D., of Saint Louis University School of Medicine in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine reviews recent “spectacular achievements of contemporary molecular biology” that hold great importance as the world prepares for a possible flu pandemic.

These achievements, including a recent genetic sequencing and recreation of the virus from the 1918 flu pandemic, “m

Using Petri dishes full of genetically engineered E. coli instead of photo paper, students at The University of Texas at Austin and UCSF successfully created the first-ever bacterial photographs.

Their work is published in this week’s issue of Nature (Nov. 24, 2005), which is devoted entirely to the emerging field of synthetic biology.

The students produced the innovative bacterial images and a bacterial camera as part of MIT’s intercollegiate Genetically Eng

Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the German Cancer Research Institute have shown how protein synthesis is targeted to certain regions of a cell–a process crucial for the cellular motility that governs nerve growth, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Their study appears in the November 24 issue of the journal Nature.

Led by Drs. Robert Singer and Dr Stefan Huettelmaier, the research team focused on migrating fibroblast cells important in wound healin

“You can eat your relatives but not your friends,” could be the off-kilter credo of a tiny marine invertebrate called a sea squirt that can physically merge with, and parasitize, its own kin. The trigger for this unseemly behavior has now been traced to a single gene, isolated by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. That gene also points to a common origin with the vertebrate immune system, far back in animal evolution, potentially shedding light on the development of our o

Genetic clues guide customized treatment for neuroblastoma

A new study reports that a loss of genes on chromosome 1 or chromosome 11 raises the risk of death from the children’s cancer neuroblastoma, even when other indicators seem to point to a lower-risk form of the disease. This research finding will help guide physicians to the most appropriate treatment for the cancer, which strikes the peripheral nervous system. The approach used may also be applied to customizing care

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that cells co-opted the machinery that usually repairs broken strands of DNA to protect the integrity of chromosomes. This finding solves for the first time an important question that has long puzzled scientists.

The natural ends of chromosomes look just like broken strands of DNA that a cell’s repair machinery is designed to fix. But mending chromosome ends, or telomeres, would set the stage for the developmen

With national attention focused on the avian flu threat, other infections that could be transmitted from animals to people are also coming under scrutiny. People with work exposure to pigs, such as farmers, veterinarians and meat processing workers, are at heightened risk of contracting swine influenza, according to a study in the Jan. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Pigs’ physical makeup allows them to contract—and to spread—influenza viruses to and fr

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh and Louisiana State University report findings in Journal of Clinical Investigation

The development of effective vaccines for people with compromised immune systems may be feasible after all, according to a team of researchers, who demonstrated their approach could protect against pneumocystis pneumonia in mice lacking the same population of immune cells that HIV destroys in humans. The vaccine platform dev

A highly dexterous, bio-inspired artificial hand and sensory system that could provide patients with active feeling, is being developed by a European project.

Funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme, the CYBERHAND project aims to hard wire this hand into the nervous system, allowing sensory feedback from the hand to reach the brain, and instructions to come from the brain to control the hand, at least in part.

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