Dr. Wesley Sundquist, professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, will present at the Experimental Biology 2003 meeting in San Diego on his work in elucidating how HIV is manufactured and assembled in the cell.

The raison d’être of a virus such as HIV, if a non-living thing can be said to have one, is to turn a host cell into a factory that churns out virus copies and releases them to infect other cells. Dr. Sundquist’s research has focused on discovering the mechanisms u

Clemson researcher part of discovery team

Science, a leading international research journal, reports today that a team of scientists, including Clemson University plant biochemist Brandon Moore, has found sugars not only serve as fuel for plants but also as signal compounds to genes critical to cell development and plant growth.

The research is considered to be groundbreaking, providing insights into the fundamental importance sugars play in both plants and animals. Scientis

Mineral salts are essential for living organisms. To be precise, it is from these, living cells get their basic components, the ions. Common salt, for example, contains chloride and sodium ions which the cell uses to establish and maintain electrochemical balance with the environment.

In order to achieve sodium equilibrium in animal cells, for example, the external sodium concentration has to be ten times greater than the internal one. It is precisely due to this difference in concentration

The major features of evolution are pre-determined and not only the result of random or accidental processes, two leading European scientists propose in a paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology .

Professor Robert Williams of the University of Oxford and Professor Fraústo da Silva of the Instituto Superior Tecnico of Lisbon, challenge the Darwinist idea that the overall course of evolution random and purposeless, and that the appearance of organisms with increasing complexity

Prolactin, a naturally occurring peptide hormone needed for milk production following pregnancy, has been found to play a major role in the development and spread of breast cancer. More recently, Dr. Charles Clevenger, the same researcher who first demonstrated the scope and mechanism of prolactin’s role in cancer, has discovered that prolactin functions directly inside the cell, not merely by sending signals across the cell membrane as had been assumed for it and all other peptide hormones.

In working to halt the overgrowth of blood vessels that feed cancerous tumors, the antiangiogenic molecules endostatin and tumstatin take two distinct and very different tactics, according to a study in the April 15 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

These findings, which currently appear on-line, suggest for the first time that these two agents combined may prove more effective in battling cancer than either one used separately.

“Just as aspirin, a

Nanowires and carbon nanotubes, each with their pluses and minuses, are advertised as the next-generation building blocks for electronic circuits a thousand times smaller than today’s semiconductor circuits.

Peidong Yang, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist, has now fabricated a new type of nanotube, made of gallium nitride, that, he says, “captures some of the great properties from nanowires and carbon nanotubes, and eliminates the not-so-good characteristics of both.

“E

Scientists at the University of Arizona have discovered a critical cold-tolerance gene in Arabidopsis. As published in the April 15th issue of Genes & Development, the identification of ICE1 by Dr. Jian-Kang Zhu and colleagues holds promising implications for the improvement of cold tolerance in agriculturally important crops.

Cold temperature is one of the major factors affecting crop yield in temperate climates, with the farming industry loosing billions of dollars each year to freezing t

UCLA graduate student Jeffrey Riffell and UCLA biology professor Richard Zimmer report the first experimental test on the role of small-scale physics as it influences the interactions between sperm and egg, and the consequences for fertilization, at the annual conference of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences in Sarasota, Fla., April 10.

“The physics of fluid motion has a profound consequence on the ability of sperm to navigate and find an egg, and therefore on fertilization,” Zimmer

Canadian-led project generates database with medical annotation available to the public

Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) have compiled the complete DNA sequence of human chromosome 7 and decoded nearly all of the genes on this medically important portion of the human genome. The research, which involved an international collaboration of 90 scientists from 10 countries, publishes in the online version of the scientific journal Science on April 10, 2003.

Two

Inactivating a protein that helps regulate the proliferation of vascular cells increases the chance of developing atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart disease, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered.

Vascular vessels endure constant pounding and considerable stresses associated with blood flow. Vascular smooth muscle cells play an important role in the development of blood vessels, providing structural integrity and the ability to dilate and constrict. The

In the May 2003 issue of EMBO reports, researchers from the German Robert Koch Institute in Berlin report finding the pathological prion protein PrPSc in a wide range of skeletal muscles after feeding hamsters with prion-infected food. PrPSc is believed to be an essential – if not the sole – constituent of the agent that causes BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

The researchers fed Syrian hamsters with food pellets that contained mashed-up brain tissue f

A new technique may allow physicians to monitor patients’ responses to molecularly targeted drugs, according to researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) *. The finding was one of three advances in proteomics – the study of proteins within cells – scheduled to be announced by researchers from the NCI-FDA Clinical Proteomics Program in a press briefing at the 94th Annual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, which was

Stanford University Medical Center researchers have identified a protein responsible for ensuring correct skull growth in newborn mice. The protein, called Noggin, inhibits fusion of bony plates in the skull until developmentally appropriate. The scientists hope that Noggin may one day replace surgery as a way to treat premature skull fusion in infants.

“About 1 in 2,000 children has growth plates in their skull that fuse prematurely,” said Michael Longaker, MD. “The brain is rapidly expand

Scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and their colleagues have unraveled some of the fundamental mysteries about the genetic mechanisms that endow the immune system with its life-saving ability to generate specialized antibodies.

Without genetic fine-tuning, antibodies would be relatively ineffective in finding a good match on the surface of viruses, parasites, and other potentially dangerous foreign pathogens. The findings also reveal the workings of a gene mutation process

Retinal abnormalities in older people without diabetes are related to hypertension. Higher blood and pulse pressure are also associated with an increased incidence of macular abnormalities, including wet and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). These are the major findings of two studies appearing in the April issue of Ophthalmology, the clinical journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the Eye M.D. Association.

The first study, assessing more than 2,000 men and women without