The looming threats of global climate change and population growth call for sweeping changes in how the world produces its food and fiber, warns a group of prestigious scientists, including an expert in plant genetics at the University of California, Davis.
Body
ITHACA, N.Y. — Finding a biological mechanism much like an online social network, scientists have identified the bacterial protein VpsT as the master regulator in Vibrio, the cause of cholera and other enteric diseases. This discovery, now published in the journal Science, provides a major tool to combat enteric disease.
A campaign that makes seasonal flu vaccinations for hospital staff free, convenient, ubiquitous and hard to ignore succeeds fairly well in moving care providers closer to a state of "herd" immunity and protecting patients from possible infection transmitted by health care workers, according to results of a survey at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Multidrug resistant bacteria such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) pose a major problem for patients, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry. To combat such bacteria, it is critical to understand how resistance is developed in the first place. It is commonly thought that an incomplete course of antibiotics would lead to resistance to that particular antibiotic by allowing the bacteria to make adaptive changes under less stringent conditions.
SAN DIEGO – (February 11, 2010) A leading immunology research institute has validated the long-held and controversial hypothesis that antibodies – usually the "good guys" in the body's fight against viruses – instead contribute to severe dengue virus-induced disease, the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology announced today. The finding has major implications for the development of a first-ever vaccine against dengue virus, a growing public health threat which annually infects 50 to 100 million people worldwide, causing a half million cases of the severest form.
A biologist at UC San Diego has discovered that honey bees warn their nest mates about dangers they encounter while feeding with a special signal that's akin to a "stop" sign for bees.
Scientists have uncovered a new gene that could help save the sight of patients with a type of inherited blindness.
The international research team led by the University of Leeds found that the TSPAN12 gene is faulty in patients with a disease known as FEVR (Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy), which affects the development of the eye.
The tiny tongue of a fruit fly could provide big answers to questions about human eating habits, possibly even leading to new ways to treat obesity, according to a study from a team of Texas A&M University researchers.
When one diagnoses a cancer patient, it's important to gather as much information about that person as possible. But who would have thought an accurate diagnosis would depend on throwing some of that information away?
That's key to the technique employed by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center as they bolster the efficiency of scanners that find and track lung and thoracic tumors.
PITTSBURGH, Feb. 11 – Patients admitted to hospitals with higher-intensity end-of-life care live longer than those admitted to hospitals with low-intensity approaches, according to a University of Pittsburgh study available online and published in the February issue of the journal Medical Care. Higher-intensity care refers to greater use of life-sustaining measures such as ICU admission, intubation or mechanical ventilation, kidney dialysis and feeding tubes.
Children and adolescents who refuse to attend school should not be given doctors' sick notes. In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[4]), child and adolescent psychiatrist Martin Knollmann and colleagues explain the causes of school avoidance and describe measures to tackle the problem.
To find the causes for cancer, biochemists and developmental biologists at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, retraced the function of an important human cancer gene 600 million years back in time. For the first time, they have identified the oncogene myc in a fresh water polyp and they have shown that this oncogene has similar biochemical functions in ancestral metazoan and in humans. The scientists published their findings in PNAS.
Athens, Ga. – A University of Georgia study has found that monarch butterflies that migrate long distances have evolved significantly larger and more elongated wings than their stationary cousins, differences that are consistent with traits known to enhance flight ability in other migratory species.
FAIRFAX, Va.-- A randomized multicenter study of 190 patients at 13 medical centers shows-- for the first time-- the "superior" benefit of stent grafts over balloon angioplasty for maintaining function of dialysis access grafts in kidney failure patients who undergo dialysis. Until now, no other therapy has proven more effective than angioplasty. At six months, the stent grafts allowed dialysis patients to continue life-saving treatment with significantly fewer interruptions and invasive procedures, according to a study published in the Feb.
Specific chemical modifications to proteins called histones, which are found in the nucleus of cells and act as spools around which DNA is wound, can be used to predict prognosis and response to treatment in subsets patients with pancreatic cancer, a study by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found.