Thrombosis – the formation of internal blood clots – is a common cause of complications and even death following surgery. To create a better means of preventing thrombosis, researchers at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine coated red blood cells (RBCs) with tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a clot-dissolving drug commonly used as an emergency treatment for stroke. When given alone, tPA has a short life span in circulation and has the potential to cause serious bleeding as it diffuses out

A European team of scientists from the University of Dundee (UK), the Technical University of Munich (Germany) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, ESRF, (France) have determined the structure of a key target enzyme for novel drug development to treat infectious diseases including malaria, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted bacterial infections. The results of their collaboration are published on the August 5 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Synchrotr

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated that a chemical that permits plants to detoxify heavy metals can be transported from the roots to stems and leaves, a finding that brings the possibility of using plants to clean up soil contaminated with toxic metals such as lead, arsenic and cadmium one step closer to reality.

A paper detailing the discovery appears this week in an advance online publication of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Stanford University Medical Center researchers have developed a way to tailor therapies to combat the specific inappropriate responses of autoimmune diseases in mice. The researchers also have shown that their technique can provide information needed to predict a disease’s progression. Eventually, their work may provide a way to reverse the course of such autoimmune diseases in humans as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and type-1 diabetes by first identifying the immune system culpri

Moscow researchers have made the supercritical carbon dioxide work. Saturated with special reagents, carbon dioxide first extracts uranium from the spent nuclear fuel waste, then extracts plutonium and then flies away into the atmosphere.

As a matter of fact, the spent nuclear fuel consists of multiple elements. First of all, this is uranium that did not burn out and plutonium obtained as a result of nuclear reaction and numerous fission fragments, both radio-active and non-radio-acti

University of Connecticut Health Center geneticists have made a two-fold discovery in gene recoding that will significantly increase understanding of the information in genome sequences and could prove to be a knowledge expressway scientists need for unraveling nervous system disorders such as Parkinson Disease and epilepsy. The research, published in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Science, was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that sup

A team from Imperial College London based at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith and the Royal Brompton Hospitals has worked with equipment developed by scientists at QinetiQ, Europe’s largest science and technology organisation, to study the heart rate of unborn babies in minute detail.

The technique, reported in this months British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, will allow doctors to monitor the health of babies’ hearts and obtain the full fetal ECG (fECG), particularl

Researchers sifting through the indispensable machinery that senses and fixes broken DNA have discovered a new culprit that can induce instability in the genome and thereby set the stage for cancer to develop.

Studies in mice have shown that loss of H2AX, a gene that produces a protein called a histone that is part of the chromosomal structure, can tip the delicate balance of proteins that are curators of the human genome. When H2AX ceases to function properly, lymphomas and solid tu

Like the snap of a clothespin, the sudden mixing of closely related species may occasionally provide the energy to impel rapid evolutionary change, according to a new report by researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. Their paper was made available online by Science magazine´s “Science Express” service.

A study of sunflower species that began 15 years ago shows that the sudden mixing and matching of different species´ genes can create genetic super

Using a new approach for dissecting the complicated interactions among many genes, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered how a common cancer gene works in tandem with another gene to spur the unchecked growth of cells. The researchers say the technique was so useful in solving a longstanding puzzle that it may expedite the discovery of other such gene interactions that lead to cancer, and could accelerate the development of new cancer drugs.

The report in the Aug

New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has identified two genes that play key roles in regulating blood vessel development.

The research appears in two reports published in the Aug. 15 issue of Molecular and Cellular Biology, a professional journal. Dr. Cam Patterson, professor of medicine and director of the Carolina Cardiovascular Biology Center and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, led both studies.

Both research papers

In the future, many cancer scientists and physicians believe, a “molecular fingerprint” of an individual´s cancer may be used to diagnose that patient´s disease and tailor therapy.

Researchers at Vanderbilt have moved a step closer to that scenario with the identification of a distinct pattern of expression of 15 proteins in lung cancers that can predict a poor prognosis or a good prognosis. All patients in the poor prognosis group had died one year after diagnosis, while all patient

Researchers in a University of Chicago lab are peering inside the minds of European starlings to find out how they recognize songs and in the process are providing insights into how the brain learns, recognizes and remembers complex sounds at the cellular level. In a study published in the Aug. 7, 2003, issue of Nature, the researchers show how songs that birds have learned to recognize trigger responses both in individual neurons and in populations of neurons in the bird’s brain.

“We found

A neat fix for ageing eyes could be tested in humans next year. The treatment, which involves replacing the contents of the lens in the eye with a soft polymer gel, could allow millions of people to throw away their reading glasses.

“At first, we see it being used as an improvement to current cataract surgery,” says Arthur Ho at the University of New South Wales, a key member of the Australian government’s multinational Vision Cooperative Research Centre (Vision CRC) that is working on

It may be a right-handed world, but recent Purdue University research indicates that the first building blocks of life were lefties – and suggests why, on a molecular level, all living things remain southpaws to this day.

In findings that may shed light on the earliest days of evolutionary history, R. Graham Cooks and a team of Purdue chemists have reported experiments that suggest why all 20 of the amino acids that comprise living things exhibit “left-handed chirality,” which refe

Why are elephants bigger than mice? The main reason is that mice have fewer cells. Research published in Journal of Biology this week uncovers a key pathway that controls the number of cells in an animal, thereby controlling its size.

Ernst Hafen and his colleagues from the University of Zürich used fruit flies to investigate the role of the insulin-signalling pathway and in particular a molecule called FOXO. If insulin signalling is reduced, for example by starving developing fly lar