The name is Fung. Daniel Y.C. Fung

He may not possess the lethal aggression or magnetism of the fictitious secret agent James Bond, but like Agent 007, Daniel Y.C. Fung is always on a mission of deadly proportions. While Bond’s assignments usually involve international intrigue and saving the world from evil villains, Fung’s life’s work is devoted to saving the world ’s food supply from deadly pathogens and bacteria. And where Ian Fleming’s cool, hard hero ha

For more than a decade, researchers have been trying to create accurate computer models of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a bacterium that makes headlines for its varied roles in food poisoning, drug manufacture and biological research.

By combining laboratory data with recently completed genetic databases, researchers can craft digital colonies of organisms that mimic, and even predict, some behaviors of living cells to an accuracy of about 75 percent.

Now, NSF-supported researchers

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute report

Professor Richard A. Lerner, M.D., Associate Professor Paul Wentworth, Jr., Ph.D., and a team of investigators at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is reporting that antibodies can destroy bacteria, playing a hitherto unknown role in immune protection. Furthermore, the team found that when antibodies do this, they appear to produce the reactive gas ozone.

“[Ozone] has never been considered a part of biology before,” say

A research team of the Department of Applied Chemistry of the University of the Basque Country has been studying the reproduction of funguses. In the laboratory of Unai Ugalde, they have studied and identified a molecule that is essential in the growing of fungus.

It is already known that funguses grow in several places, but the factors that affect their growing are still unknown. Funguses grow through hypha, that is, small filamentous. However, in certain situations they produce spores tha

Childhood Strokes Have Complex Causes
Patient Evaluations Should Seek Treatable Risk Factors

When children suffer strokes, physicians should look beyond the obvious causes to find risk factors that could be treated, say the authors of large British study of childhood stroke published November 15 in the on-line edition of the Annals of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Neurological Association.

About half the children in the study of more than 200 stroke v

Scientists open door to possible new treatments for urinary tract infections

Clingy bacteria often spell trouble. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered how bacteria manufacture hair-like fibers used to cling to the lining of the kidney and bladder where they cause urinary tract infections (UTIs). The results are published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Cell.

“Our findings should lead to new drugs to treat UTIs by blocking t

A gene may be responsible for halting the spread of cancer through the body, according to scientists at the University of Virginia Health System. The gene, called RhoGDI2, could also be used as a warning to help catch the spread of cancer in patients earlier. A multidisciplinary team of scientists, led by Dr. Dan Theodorescu, professor of urology and molecular physiology at U.Va., used advanced DNA technology to discover that low levels of RhoGDI2 were found more often in invasive cancer than in loca

For the first time in the world, researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, along with collaborators at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and Michigan State University have uncovered two genetically informative molecules from a single fossil bone. In addition to the recovery of mitochondrial DNA, the complete sequencing of a bone protein, osteocalcin, makes this a major scientific breakthrough. Extending this work to additional fossils could change perceptions of evolutiona

Technology offers potential for treatment of cancer and other diseases

UCLA scientists coupled the protein that makes fireflies glow with a device similar to a home video camera to eavesdrop on cellular conversations in living mice. Reported in the Nov. 11 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their findings may speed development of new drugs for cancer, cardiovascular diseases and neurological diseases.

Led by Dr. Sanjiv Gambhir, UCLA associ

Bacteria in space, beware. New technology to monitor and identify bacteria is in the works.

Dr. George E. Fox and Dr. Richard Willson, researchers on the National Space Biomedical Research Institute’s immunology and infection team, have developed a new technology to characterize unknown bacteria. Its immediate application will be for identifying bacteria in space, but it will eventually aid in diagnosing medical conditions and detecting biological hazards on Earth.

“Underst

Scientists have shown, for the first time, that changes in a large-scale climate system can synchronize population fluctuations in multiple mammal species across a continent-scale region. The study, to be published in the 14 November 2002 issue of the journal Nature, compares long-term data on the climate system known as the North Atlantic Oscillation with long-term data from Greenland on the population dynamics of caribou and muskoxen, which are large mammals adapted to breeding in the Arctic.

A step to further understanding of the process whereby genes are turned on and off in living organisms has been achieved by a team of researchers at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School. Understanding of this process has substantial consequences for furthering the use of medical genetic engineering to grow new tissue to replace damaged or defective organs or to halt the growth of undesirable tumors.

The achievement is described in an article in the current issue of Nature magazine

Appendix removal delays the onset of inflammatory bowel disease and lessens the symptoms, especially if done before the age of 20, finds research in Gut.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are the most common forms of inflammatory bowel disease and affect around 5 in every 1000 people.

The researchers based their analysis on a survey of patients registered with the Brisbane Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research Group between 1995 and 1999. They included 307 patients with Crohn’s

Bioengineers have for the first time used a computer model to relate specific genetic mutations to exact variations of a disease. This is the first model-based system for predicting phenotype (function of the cell or organism) based on genotype (an individual’s DNA).

In the study, published in Genome Research (Vol. 12, Issue 11, 1687-1692, November 2002, article link), Bernhard Palsson and his team at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering reviewed genetic information from patients who have an

Clinical tests began today of a novel vaccine directed at the three most globally important HIV subtypes, or clades. Developed by scientists at the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center (VRC), part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the vaccine incorporates HIV genetic material from clades A, B and C, which cause about 90 percent of all HIV infections around the world.

“This is the first multigene, multiclade HIV vaccine to enter human trials,” no

A new molecular tag discovered by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center may help doctors decide which breast cancer patients need more aggressive treatment and which can forego the potentially toxic course of chemotherapy.

Khandan Keyomarsi, Ph.D., associate professor in experimental radiation at M. D. Anderson, and her colleagues report in the November 14, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that high levels of a protein called cyclin E are close