A genetic variant that can explain the occurrence of a type of rheumatic disorder called SLE has been identified by a research team at Uppsala University, Sweden. The team, led by Associate Professor Marta Alarcón at the Rudbeck Laboratory, is presenting its finding in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics.

Nearly 6,000 predominantly young women are victims of systemic lupus erythematosus, SLE. The disease is partly genetic and causes damage to the skin and various organ

A University of Surrey team led by Professor Ravi Silva has demonstrated a new method of growing carbon nanofibres at room temperature. Published in this week’s Nature Materials, the technique they have used involves substituting the thermal energy requirements for growth with plasma decomposition of methane on the Ni catalyst.

Professor Silva said “We believe that vapour-grown carbon fibres would offer the most cost-effective means of producing discontinuous carbon fibres using large-scale

With the genomes of humans and several insects, animals and crop plants mapped or sequenced, biologists are turning their attention to single-celled algae no thicker than a human hair. Among the possible payoffs: crops requiring less fertilizer, a source of renewable energy and a new source for novel proteins.

The algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii , already are an important biological model for genetics research. Now, the complete genome of the plant’s chloroplast has been sequenced

The shapes and internal structures of individual cells within some of the earliest multicellular animals have been revealed for the first time using technology normally associated with hospitals.

Paleontologists Whitey Hagadorn of Amherst College and Shuhai Xiao of Tulane University have revealed the internal structure of 600-million-year-old fossilized embryos using specialized microscopic three-dimensional x-ray computer tomography (microCT). Hagadorn will present preliminary findi

What constrained the evolution of life during the very hot early Earth? Was a simple drop in temperature largely responsible for the emergence of cyanobacteria, a large and varied group of bacteria with chlorophyll that carry out photosynthesis in the presence of light and air with concomitant production of oxygen? Was it a reduction in carbon-dioxide levels?

Geochemist David Schwartzman of Howard University and Ken Caldeira of the Climate and Carbon Cycle Group at Lawrence Livermore Nation

The outcome for some cancer patients can now be predicted much earlier by making the right choice of treatment based on a mathematical model rather than the current life-table method, which has been in use for over 20 years, according to research published today in the Institute of Physics Journal Physics in Medicine & Biology.

The paper`s author, Dr Richard Mould, explains that clinical trials usually try to establish which cancer treatment is more effective, A or B. Dr Mould has now desig

Scans show amplified pain signals in patients with back pain of unknown origin

Patients with lower back pain that can’t be traced to a specific physical cause may have abnormal pain-processing pathways in their brains, according to a new study led by University of Michigan researchers.

The effect, which as yet has no explanation, is similar to an altered pain perception effect in fibromyalgia patients recently reported by the same research team.

In fact, the study

Pill count has the greatest impact on adherence, survey reports

The total number of pills that need to be taken every day in HAART therapy has the greatest impact on adherence of 10 characteristics studied, according to a survey of HIV positive individuals, nearly two-thirds of whom had experienced at least three treatment regimens. The findings of the Perspectives on Adherence and Simplicity for HIV+ Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy (PASPORT) survey were presented here today at the

Pediatricians have another weapon in their arsenal to fight infections that have shown resistance to common antibiotics, according to data presented today by a team of investigators led by Baylor College of Medicine.

Study results showed that linezolid, a new type of antibiotic, is well-tolerated and as effective as the most common antibiotic, vancomycin, in treating infants and children with known or suspected gram-positive infections, reported Dr. Sheldon Kaplan, Baylor professor of

Among postmenopausal women, glucocorticoid users six times more likely to fracture

Daily dosing with oral glucocorticoids (corticosteroids) for chronic diseases was found to be a strong predictor of spinal fracture at one year, according to new data presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). The risk of fracture was found to increase incrementally with every 1 mg increase above 7.5 mg in the daily dose of the glucocorticoid.

Phy

New weapon in the fight against cancer?

The use of live bacteria to treat cancer goes back a hundred years. But while the therapy can sometimes shrink tumors, the treatment usually leads to toxicity, limiting its value in medicine.

Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have isolated a protein secreted by bacteria that kills cancer cells but appears to have no harmful side effects. Tested in mice injected with human melanomas, the protein shrank the maligna

17th International Congress on Thrombosis, Bologna, 26 October 2002: Important results from the EXPRESS clinical trial for the oral direct thrombin inhibitor (Oral DTI), EXANTA™ (oral ximelagatran and its active form, melagatran) show its superior efficacy in reducing risk of major venous thromboembolism (VTE), compared with a routinely used prophylactic treatment, enoxaparin, in major orthopaedic surgery.
Results show a significant 63 per cent relative risk reduction (2.3% vs 6.3%) in major ve

Washington University chemist offers radical new strategy in fight against cancer

Today, even the best cancer treatments kill about as many healthy cells as they do cancer cells but John-Stephen A. Taylor, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, has a plan to improve that ratio. Over the last several years, Taylor has begun to lay the conceptual and experimental groundwork for a radical new strategy for chemotherapy — one that turns existing drugs into me

Brachiopods, the most common shellfish in Paleozoic times, now live primarily in the chilly waters of northern fjords and the Antarctic shelf, except for an abundant population in the tropic waters of the continental shelf off southeast Brazil.

The Brazilian brachiopods are the best modern analogy for the life and times of the critter that was so pervasive over 250 million years ago, says David Rodland, Ph.D. student in geological sciences at Virginia Tech. He has been studying the p

Body size is one of the most important biological characteristics in the study of organisms, telling a researcher a lot about how a particular animal lives and interacts with it’s environment and with other species. Despite this importance, there has been little study of body size trends of ancient life.

Now, using marine life forms as models, three Virginia Tech doctoral students in geological sciences have launched a long-term research project to see what can be learned about life ac

Get ready to rewrite those biology textbooks – again. Although the “lowly” blue-green algae, or Cyanobacteria, have long been credited as one of Earth’s earliest life forms and the source of the oxygen in the early Earth’s atmosphere, they might be neither.

By creating a new genetic family tree of the world’s most primitive bacteria and comparing it to the geochemistry of ancient iron and sulfur deposits, Carrine Blank of Washington University has found evidence that instead of Cyanobacter