In the quest to understand genomes—how they're built, how they're organized and what makes them work—a team of Johns Hopkins researchers has engineered from scratch a computer-designed yeast chromosome and incorporated into their creation a new system that lets scientists intentionally rearrange the yeast's genetic material. A report of their work appears September 14 as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature.
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OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sept. 14, 2011 -- An Oak Ridge National Laboratory invention able to quickly predict three-dimensional structure of protein could have huge implications for drug discovery and human health.
Scientists have deciphered the genome of a bacterium implicated as a key player in regulating the immune system of mice. The genomic analysis provides the first glimpse of its unusually sparse genetic blueprint and offers hints about how it may activate a powerful immune response that protects mice from infection but also spurs harmful inflammation.
DURHAM, N.C. -- The number of sea turtles accidentally caught and killed in fishing gear in United States coastal waters has declined by an estimated 90 percent since 1990, according to a new study by researchers at Duke University Project GloBAL and Conservation International.
The report, published in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, credits the dramatic drop to measures that have been put into place over the last 20 years to reduce bycatch in many fisheries, as well as to overall declines in U.S. fishing activity.
AMES, Iowa – Consumers are eager to get their hands on, and teeth into, foods that are genetically modified to increase health benefits – and even pay more for the opportunity.
A study by Iowa State University researcher Wallace Huffman shows that when consumers are presented with produce enhanced with consumer traits through intragenic means, they will pay significantly more than for plain produce.
The research is published in the current issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
The blood from woolly mammoths—those extinct elephant-like creatures that roamed the Earth in pre-historic times—is helping scientists develop new blood products for modern medical procedures that involve reducing patients' body temperature. The report appears in ACS' journal Biochemistry.
Consumers could soon see packages of pasta labeled "good source of dietary fiber" and "may reduce the risk of heart disease" thanks to the development of a new genre of pasta made with barley—a grain famous for giving beer its characteristic strength and flavor. The report appears in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Researchers report discovery of a completely new technology for more efficiently separating gold, silver, copper, and other valuable materials from rock and ore. Their report on the process, which uses nanoparticles to latch onto those materials and attach them to air bubbles in a flotation machine, appears in the ACS journal Langmuir.
José Carlos Mendes Santos (a.k.a. Louro) is a handyman in rural northeastern Bahia, Brazil - one of the areas of the world with the highest biodiversity. Two years ago, he found a tiny, inch-high plant with white-and-pink flowers in the backyards of the off-the-grid house of amateur botanist and local plant collector Alex Popovkin. The little plant was brought home to be grown on a window sill for closer observation. In parallel, work on its identification began.
Precise diagnosis of disease and developmental syndromes often depends on understanding the genetics underlying them. Most cases of early onset hearing loss are genetic in origin but there are many different forms. Heretofore, it has been difficult to identify the gene responsible for the hearing loss of each affected child, because the critical mutations differ among countries and populations. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology has identified six critical mutations in Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab families.
The observation that milkmaids are frequently infected with cowpox but rarely catch smallpox is generally credited to the English doctor Edward Jenner. Although Jenner might not have been the first person to notice the correlation, he was the first to make use of it: in 1796 he "vaccinated" children with material from cowpox blisters and showed that they became immune to smallpox. Jenner's work led directly to the development of a smallpox vaccine and less than 200 years later the disease was eradicated.
Botanical taxonomy, which extends to include the formal scientific naming of all plants, algae and fungi has gone through a landmark change in the procedure scientists need to follow when they describe new species. Details of the forthcoming changes to the newly-named 'International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants' are laid out by Dr Sandra Knapp and colleagues in an article published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
While electronic cigarettes may be a long-term alternative to the real thing for some smokers, Penn State College of Medicine researchers suggest medical providers should continue to encourage more traditional smoking cessation methods.
Samson Muchina Kinyanjui and colleagues from the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya discuss in this week's PLoS Medicine how they modified the programme's informed consent processes by taking into account local social, cultural, and economic contexts in the design and administration of consent forms. They stress that institutional wide support is important in ensuring consistency in the consenting process for all studies within a given institution.
Making use of a new "super resolution" microscope that provides sharp images at extremely small scales, scientists have achieved unprecedented views of the immune system in action. The new tool, a stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope, shows how granules from natural killer cells pass through openings in dynamic cell structures to destroy their targets: tumor cells and cells infected by viruses. Deeper understanding of these biological events may allow scientists to devise more effective treatments for inherited diseases that impair the immune system.