A US$53-million international project to sequence the cattle genome, involving CSIRO, was launched today (1pm, Friday, 12 December US, 5am Saturday, 13 December AEST) in Washington, United States.

The joint sequencing effort is led by the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and also involves United States Department of Agriculture; the State of Texas; Genome Canada; and Agritech Investments Ltd, Dairy Insight Inc. and

The researchers — led by Lokesh Joshi, an ASU associate professor in the Harrington Department of Bioengineering of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and a member of the Arizona BioDesign Institute — have found a pathway whereby plants can generate human-like proteins. This discovery could lead to an effective means of producing proteins that are medically important and do so with a method that could be effective and less expensive than current methods, Joshi said.

“The discovery ha

Purdue University scientists have peered inside a virus and visualized for the first time how it produces and exports genetic materials into a host cell, an advance in fundamental research that also could have implications for the development of antiviral agents.

Using improved microscope technology, a team including Purdue’s Timothy S. Baker and a colleague at Harvard has determined the structure of a reovirus (short for “respiratory enteric orphan” virus) down to the 7.6-angstrom scale, be

By studying the “memory” of the respiratory system, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified a key player – a protein called BDNF that’s involved in learning – responsible for the body’s ability to keep breathing properly, despite the challenges it may face.

The findings, published Dec. 14 in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience, could provide ideas of new drug targets, which could lead to new treatments for or ways to prevent a number of

Researchers at Ohio State University have created a DNA gene chip that contains thousands of the genes for a horse and one of the first gene chips for a domestic animal.

The new chip houses more than 3,200 expressed horse genes on a sliver of glass about the size of a postage stamp. When the researchers began developing this chip two years ago, only 200 horse genes were known.

This new chip will allow researchers to scan an individual horses genes at once to see which ones are acti

New research identifies the molecular mechanisms that keep a plant’s circadian clock running on a 24-hour schedule.

The study, reported this week in the journal Nature, is the first to describe the physical connection between two molecular components -– genes called TOC1 and ZTL — that keep a plant’s “clock” running at the right speed. Scientists have spent more than a decade trying to understand the interactions between the components that regulate a plant’s timing.

Knowin

As New Year’s Eve approaches and you prepare to pop open that champagne bottle, keep your fingers crossed for small bubbles … and lots of them.

That long train of tiny, rising bubbles is the key to the drink’s flavor and aroma, scientists say. And the smaller the bubbles, the better, according to the people who should know, researchers in the Champagne region of France, home to the famous vineyards that gave birth to the bubbly wine.

“Our ultimate goal is to cre

A single gene appears to kick off a critical step in the development of the early embryo – the formation of the brain and spinal cord – and thus may offer a way to screen for fetal spinal cord defects such as spina bifida.

Neural tube defects, including spina bifida – an open spinal cord – and anencephaly, or lack of a complete brain, are among the most common serious birth defects in the United States. While the incidence has gone down in this country thanks to educational efforts encourag

In a follow-up analysis of the most extensive study of its kind on the long-term effects of air pollution on human health, researchers have found that people living in U.S. cities face an increased risk of dying from a heart attack as a result of long-term exposure to air pollution. This increased risk was found to be as large as that associated with being a former smoker. The new analysis is published as a study in the rapid access issue of the journal Circulation, published by the American Heart As

Duke University Medical Center researchers have identified the second of three genes that can each independently cause the disorder known as cerebral cavernous malformations (CCM), which is characterized by mulberry-like clusters of blood vessels in the brain. The finding paves the way for a new genetic test for the rare, familial disease, which typically lies dormant in patients for decades before its potentially devastating symptoms appear, said the researchers.

The vessel lesions in the

Mike Erice was shocked when a biopsy determined that he was one of the more than 220,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year. Just a year earlier, results of his annual prostate specific antigen test (PSA) had been excellent, giving the 60-year-old private investigator a sense of security. This time, however, his doctor included a digital rectal exam and ordered the biopsy when he felt something suspicious. Because prostate cancer kills 28,000 men each year, Erice and his wife quick

By tailoring the dosage of chemotherapy to each individual patient, the treatment of breast cancer could be improved considerably. This is shown in a dissertation by Uppsala researcher Henrik Lindman at Uppsala University in Sweden. The method has proven to yield excellent results in clinical tests.

The dissertation reports that an alternative way of tailoring the dosage of chemotherapy has been studied and found to work. If the advantages of this method compared to standard treatment can be

The potential of new technologies to reveal insights into the fundamental structure and function of biological systems continues to grow rapidly –but the ability to interpret and merge these datasets lags behind the ability to collect it. In an effort to overcome these limitations, Sven Bergmann, Jan Ihmels, and Naama Barkai, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, developed a comparative model that integrates gene expression data from microarrays with genomic sequence information

You might say that caspases are obsessed with death. The primary agents of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, caspases kill cells by destroying proteins that sustain cellular processes. Apoptosis, a highly controlled sequence of events that eliminates dangerous or unnecessary cells, contributes to a wide variety of developmental and physiological processes–in a developing embryo, apoptosis creates the space between fingers and adjusts nerve cell populations to match the number of cells they targe

Moscow biologists have proved that people can use the capability of some plants to protect themselves from vermin insects with the help of biologically active substances.

It has been found that plants can protect themselves from vermin insects. One way is to use substances which the plants synthesise to suppress insects’ hormones activity and to disrupt their development cycle. Having studied the way these substances act, people can try to use these substances for their own purposes.

Laboratory researchers and urologic oncologists from Fox Chase Cancer Center have demonstrated the ability to identify kidney cancer, including localized (stage I) cancer, in the urine of affected patients. The research, supported in part by a grant from the Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute and the National Cancer Institute’s Early Detection Research Network, is published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

As with other cancers, an early diagnosis of kidne