Long ago genetic engineering got deep reach into pharmacological and food industry, agriculture and medicine. The trees are no exclusion, but genetic engineers started to deal with them approximately ten years later than with other objects: the trees are too difficult for genetic investigations and manipulations. The wood plant genetic engineering activities are now in full swing in different countries of the world, including Russia. When improving trees through classical selection methods, the resea

Many creatures including our fellow primates the New World Monkeys rely on highly specific scent molecules called pheromones to find a suitable mate. Even our humble mammal cousin, the mouse, was found to have 140 genes just for pheromone receptors when its genome was completely sequenced earlier this year.

But humans are clueless when it comes to pheromone signals, according to University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi “George” Zhang. He believes color vision put our pheromones

Little is known about the effect of an individual’s immune history on their response to a donated tissue transplant. An important study by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, reveals that individuals harboring virally-induced memory T cells that are cross reactive with donor antigens are resistant to conventional strategies designed to induce transplant tolerance.

Enormous progress has been achieved in the field of transplantation during the past 3 decades, due in larg

Curacyte AG, a Munich-based drug development company focused on novel treatments of inflammatory diseases, thrombotic disorders and cancer has announced today that its scientists have discovered a series of novel small molecule inhibitors of matriptase, a trypsin-like serine protease. Matriptase is an important mediator in the degradation of the extracellular matrix, a process which plays a key role during metastasis. Inhibiting this key enzyme produced by tumor cells might provide a route to prevent

Studies indicate that congenitally blind (blind from birth) people have superior verbal memory abilities than the sighted. Why and what is the significance of this?

A new study by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Ehud Zohary of the Department of Neurobiology at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a better understanding of this phenomenon through closer examination of how and where information is processed in the brains of blin

Some people can burn the midnight oil, while others might prefer to tackle their challenges early in the morning. Although most people know instinctively if they are an ‘evening’ or ‘morning’ person, scientists have now discovered why we fall into a certain category.

Scientists at the University of Surrey, in co-operation with clinical colleagues at St Thomas’’s Hospital (London) and Hospital de Gelderse Vallei (Netherlands), have discovered a correlation between a difference in th

Putting to rest years of controversy, an international research team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has discovered that the eye’s job of detecting light is most likely carried out by just three cell types.

Writing in the June 15 advance online section of Nature, the team reports that rods, cones and special retinal cells that make a protein called melanopsin together account for the entirety of a mouse’s reaction to light levels. Others have proposed a role for cells that make proteins cal

A human mission to Mars may still be some time away, but scientists are already aware of the many hazards that must be overcome if the dream is to become a reality. One particular cause for concern is the potential for physiological and psychological problems that could arise from the conditions of weightlessness, isolation and confinement experienced during a journey that could last six months or more.

To address these concerns ESA, in cooperation with the French space agency CNES, NASA and

Pathway identified to target for drug development

In one of the most significant breakthroughs in allergic diseases research in recent years, an international group of scientists led by researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have discovered 291 genes associated with asthma. The Cincinnati Children’s scientists used gene chip analysis to identify these genes they refer to as “asthma signature genes,” and they discovered a new and promising pathway involv

Researchers at the University of Rochester have produced compelling evidence of how the hand of natural selection caused one species of fruit fly to split into two more than 2 million years ago. The study, appearing in today’s issue of Nature, answers one of evolutionary biologists’ most basic questions–how do species divide–by looking at the very DNA responsible for the division. Understanding why certain genes evolve the way they do during speciation can shed light on some of the least

Research led by Professor Paul Sharp at The University of Nottingham’s Institute of Genetics has shed further light on the origins of HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS.

For more than 10 years, Professor Sharp has been collaborating with Professor Beatrice Hann, at the University of Alabama, on research aimed at clarifying the origins and evolution of AIDS viruses. In 1999, this team identified the origin of HIV-1 as being transmission of a virus (SIVcpz) from chimpanzees to humans, but a mys

For just pennies per person per year, the new Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) plans to bring the benefits of foods fortified with vitamins and minerals and end micronutrient deficiency for the poor in developing countries, which can save millions of lives and prevent crippling conditions such as blindness and mental retardation.

“Micronutrient deficiency also has many invisible economic effects that are widely underestimated, because they sap the energy of working-age p

Using a so-called “data-mining” method, it is possible to automatically find previously unknown side-effects of drugs in the huge WHO database of side-effect reports. This is demonstrated in a doctoral dissertation by Andrew Bate at Umeå University in Sweden.

The use of pharmaceuticals sometimes causes side-effects. By gathering reports about suspected cases of side-effects, it is possible to detect previously unknown ties between a certain drug and a side-effect at an early stage, so-calle

Researchers uncover new tumor suppression mechanism

Cancerous and precancerous cells can detect that they are abnormal and kill themselves, or remain alive indefinitely but cease proliferating, through two intrinsic processes called programmed cell death and cellular senescence. One goal of cancer chemotherapy is to help stimulate these potent antitumor processes.

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island have recently shown that by locking cancer cells int

A biomedical-imaging technique that would highlight the cytoskeletal infrastructure of nerve cells and map the nervous system as it develops and struggles to repair itself has been proposed by biophysics researchers at Cornell and Harvard universities.

Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS June 10, 2003) , the researchers say that besides the new imaging technique’s obvious applications in studying the dynamics of nervous system development, it could answer the

The tiny spheres inside brain cells that ferry chemical messengers into the synapse make their rounds much more expeditiously than once assumed, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – funded researchers have discovered. They used a dye to track the behavior of such synaptic vesicles in real time, in rat brain cells. Rather than fusing completely with the cell membrane and disgorging their dye contents all at once, brain vesicles more often remained intact, secreting only part of the tracer car