Microscopic glass beads wearing coats identical to the outer membrane of a cell provide a powerful assay for proteins that bind to cell membranes, such as protein drugs or drug candidates, according to chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

The membrane-coated beads, complete with receptors that dot the surfaces of real cells, also would make a sensitive detection system for viruses or protein toxins like those produced by choler

Acinetobacter baumannii is an opportunistic pathogen operating in hospitals creating serious infections such as pneumonia. It principally affects patients who have weakened health and this is why we call it opportunistic. Moreover, the mortality rate from these infections are usually high given, on the one hand, the weakness of the patient and, on the other, A. baumannii is resistant to many antibiotics. Furthermore, once a specific course of treatment is prescribed for A. Baumannii, the pathogen has

It has been said that a human being is a veritable encyclopedia of proteins. Proteins are the fabric of life – they provide the bricks and mortar of our cells, and run day-to-day operations. When these functions go awry – when too much or too little protein is produced, when a daisy-chain network of proteins working together is disrupted – illness can arise.

While an errant genetic code may underlie a disorder, biologists have estimated that 98 percent of disease is caused by something wrong

In one of the biggest advances to come from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in its 16-year history, researchers have unlocked at least part of the mystery of how tumors flourish undetected by keeping their presence a secret from sentries of the body’s immune system.

“Flying beneath the radar” is how Nature Reviews Cancer (http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nrc/journal/v4/n1/full/nrc1261_fs.html) labels the mechanism of tumors evading capture, a proce

Two groups of researchers (from the University of Lubeck and from University of Sydney) report on a novel method of measuring the experience of suffering in the January issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

Measuring the impact of illness is important for several reasons. The Pictorial Representation of Illness and Self Measure (PRISM) is a recently developed tool purported to assess burden of suffering due to illness. The nature of the PRISM task suggests a conceptual link to the illn

Because of their therapeutic potential, stem cells are today a major focus of at-tention in biomedical research. To realise this potential, however, it is essential to know the signal factors that can regulate the differentiation of a stem cell into the various cell types of an organism. An important factor in stem cell biology is the signal protein “Wnt”. In the case of quite a number of stem cell types, such as embryonal stem cells or stem cells of the central nervous system, “Wnt” re-sults in cell

Mayo Clinic genomics researchers are the first to demonstrate that mixing of genetic material can occur naturally, in a living body. The researchers have discovered conditions in which pig cells and human cells can fuse together in the body to yield hybrid cells that contain genetic material from both species and carry a swine virus similar to HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) that can infect normal human cells.

While the research does not answer the question of whether this infection can ca

Researchers at the University of Florida say they have shown that minerals were key to some of the initial processes that formed life on Earth.

Specifically, a borax-containing mineral known as colemanite helps convert organic molecules found in interstellar dust clouds into a sugar, known as ribose, central to the genetic material called RNA. This announcement provides a key step toward solving the 3-billion-year-old mystery of how life on Earth began. The findings will appear in Friday’s

Researchers have identified a crucial step in a genetic process required for the development of viable eggs. The process, known as imprinting, distinguishes the paternally-inherited and the maternally-inherited copies of a number of developmentally important genes.

The majority of mammalian genes are present in two copies, both of which are equally expressed and regulated. A small number of mammalian genes, however, are subject to special regulation by a process called gene imprinting. The i

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the Johns Hopkins University have discovered a gene that plays a key role in initiating changes in the brain in response to sensory experience, a finding that may provide insight into certain types of learning disorders.

After birth, learning and experience change the architecture of the brain dramatically. The structure of individual neurons, or nerve cells, changes during learning to accommodate new connections between neurons. Neur

Researchers at the University of Oregon and Stanford University have located a mechanism in the human brain that blocks unwanted memories. This is the first time that anyone has shown a neurobiological basis for memory repression.

The findings, by lead researcher Michael Anderson, associate professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and his colleague, John D.E. Gabrieli, professor of psychology at Stanford, will be published Jan. 9 in Science.

The research provides compe

Research among households in Peru in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlights how healthy growth of infants in less-developed countries is directly related to water supply, water storage, and sanitation-children who grow up in households where these facilities are unavailable or of poor quality are more likely to experience diarrhoeal disease and reduced body growth, with implications for later adult development.

William Checkley from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins

Age at Onset and Inflammatory Cells Define Patient Subsets, Guide Treatment

People who develop asthma as children may have a different disease than those who develop it as an adult. A study in the January issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology adds to the growing body of evidence that asthma is not a single disease, but a group of syndromes with different origins and biological characteristics. The research team, led by Sally Wenzel, M.D., a pulmonologist at National

Studies on common baker’s yeast have led to the discovery of what may be a long-sought mechanism in the life cycle of retroviruses, including the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Knowing the details of this step in the infection process could help pinpoint targets for new classes of drugs to fight HIV.

In the Jan. 9 issue of the journal Science, Thomas Menees and Zhi Cheng of the University of Missouri-Kansas City describe the formation of a lariat structure with the genetic materia

Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) Norwich, have discovered the molecular change that allows plants to remember winter.

Many plants need a cold period (3-8 weeks at 4° – 8°C) early in their growth to stimulate them to flower, this is called vernalisation, and without a suitable cold treatment flowering is delayed. JIC scientists have identified many of the genes involved in this process but their latest discovery is a chemical modification that occurs on one of these genes, wh

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced that the first draft version of the honey bee genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases.

The sequence of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was assembled by a team led by Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The honey bee genome is about one-tenth the size of the human genome, containin