But moderate consumption of wine may be protective

Stony Brook University (Stony Brook, NY) researchers report that people who drink at least 9 glasses of alcoholic beverages made with distilled spirits per week for more than 10 years are much more likely than nondrinkers to develop colorectal cancer or premalignant polyps. They also note a protective effect for those who drink wine. The results, which will be presented at the 68th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of

Some 200,000 people live with partial or nearly total permanent paralysis in the United States, with spinal cord injuries adding 11,000 new cases each year. Most research aimed at recovering motor function has focused on repairing damaged nerve fibers, which has succeeded in restoring limited movement in animal experiments. But regenerating nerves and restoring complex motor behavior in humans are far more difficult, prompting researchers to explore alternatives to spinal cord rehabilitation.

Insights gained from extensive studies in mice may someday lead to treatments for comparable neurodegenerative diseases in humans

Scientists at Jefferson Medical College and the University of Michigan have uncovered a gene defect responsible for a muscle-wasting, neurodegenerative disease in mice known as mnd2. Their results may provide insights into the molecular origins of other such diseases in humans, including Parkinson’s disease.

In an online report on October 8 in the

Walking down a dark alley late at night is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Your heart starts racing, your palms get clammy and you get ready to run. Now researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit information about your surroundings to your organs, enabling them to respond appropriately.

The research, to be published on Friday in BMC Neuroscience, has shown that neurons originating in high-order brain structures transmit signals about the

Dutch researcher Annelieke Franke has discovered that the aging of the brain adversely affects the fertility of female rats. The scientist suspects that her research will provide insights into fertility problems of women over the age of 30.

Franke studied relatively young subfertile rats. Although the pituitary gland and ovaries of these rats still functioned normally, their brains had already started to function differently. This led Franke to conclude that the ageing of the brain reduces f

Fly genetics may increase understanding of human hearing disorders

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Medical School have found genetic evidence linking humans and fruit flies in a new way: through their hearing. The link offers the future possibility that the insect’s auditory system may serve as a model for understanding human deafness and other hearing disorders.

The scientists found that a mutated fruit fly gene controlling hearing and the mutated human coun

Purdue University biologists have determined the structure of the West Nile virus, a development that could greatly augment our understanding of the virus’ life cycle.

Using cryoelectron microscopy and advanced imaging techniques, the Purdue team has determined the orientation of the major surface proteins in a West Nile viral particle. Because these proteins are instrumental in allowing the virus to bind to and invade a host cell, the research could be a step forward in combating the

Genes and behavior go together in honey bees so strongly that an individual bee’s occupation can be predicted by knowing a profile of its gene expression in the brain, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This strong relationship surfaced in a complex molecular study of 6,878 different genes replicated with 72 cDNA microarrays that captured the essence of brain gene activity within the natural world of the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Even though most of th

Professor Ana Wünsch Blanco has presented her PhD, at the Public University of Navarre, on the application of molecular technologies in the identification and enhancement of the cherry fruit tree.

The application of molecular technologies in the identification and enhancement of the cherry tree is not something new. In fact, the varietal identification of fruit species has been accompanied, in the past few years, by the appearance of DNA markers. This has enabled an investigation of the geno

Results of a study from Malawi in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight how antiretroviral therapy targeted at babies soon after childbirth (because their mothers’ HIV diagnosis was made around the time of delivery) is still effective in preventing vertical HIV-1 transmission from mothers to their children.

Zidovudine and nevirapine have been shown to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV in breastfeeding women in Africa; treatment is usually initiated late in pregnancy and continue

Giel Hendriks discovered that the linking of sugars to the protein aq

Dutch research has revealed that bone cement containing antibiotics can effectively control infections around prostheses but only during the first few days after the implantation. For the past 30 years bone cement, which affixes hip and knee prostheses to the bone, has contained antibiotics and from the start, the usefulness of this has been contested.

In a laboratory set-up, Hans Hendriks discovered that in the immediate vicinity of the antibiotic-containing bone cement, the antibiotic con

A Canadian-led international clinical trial has found that post-menopausal survivors of early-stage breast cancer who took the drug letrozole after completing an initial five years of tamoxifen therapy had a significantly reduced risk of cancer recurrence compared to women taking a placebo. The results of the study appear in today’s advance on-line edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The clinical trial has been halted early because of the positive results and researchers ar

Cyclacel Limited, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it had entered into an agreement with MRC geneservice for the distribution of its proprietary Drosophila RNA interference (RNAi) collection. This agreement will allow access for MRC geneservice’s academic and commercial clients to the Cyclacel collection, for gene identification and validation purposes.

The Cyclacel Drosophila RNAi set covers some 13,605 genes defined in the FlyBase Drosophila genome database. The

The molecular mechanisms that may assist the tumor suppressing gene Rb2/p130 in blocking the progression of lung cancer cells has been clearly identified for the first time according to a study by researchers at Temple University’s Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine.

The results of their study, “pRb2/p130 target genes in non-small cell lung cancer cells identified by microarray analysis,” appear in the Oct. 9 issue of Oncogene (http://www.nature.com/onc/).

Scientists at the University of Chicago have demonstrated that sleeping has an important and previously unrecognized impact on improving people’s ability to learn language.

Researchers find that ability of students to retain knowledge about words is improved by sleep, even when the students seemed to forget some of what they learned during the day before the next night’s sleep. This paper, “Consolidation During Sleep of Perceptual Learning of Spoken Language,” is being published i