Body

For the first time, malarial mosquitoes have been modified to be infertile and pass on the trait rapidly - raising the possibility of reducing the spread of disease.

The mosquito species Anopheles gambiae is a major carrier of dangerous malaria parasites in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90 per cent of annual malaria deaths occur. Malaria infects more than 200 million people each year and causes more than 430,000 deaths.

All living things require proteins, members of a vast family of molecules that nature "makes to order" according to the blueprints in DNA.

Through the natural process of evolution, DNA mutations generate new or more effective proteins. Humans have found so many alternative uses for these molecules - as foods, industrial enzymes, anti-cancer drugs - that scientists are eager to better understand how to engineer protein variants designed for specific uses.

Scientists from Switzerland and the Netherlands have conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proteins that the bacterium Escherichia coli expresses in 22 different growth conditions. More than 2,300 proteins were identified, some at average levels of one copy per cell. The resulting dataset describes most (>90 percent) of the protein mass in the cells and will be a treasure trove for cell biologists. A first description is published on 7 December in Nature Biotechnology.

You know them well. You might even be one of them.

They're the people who tint their Facebook profile pictures with the French flag to support Parisians, or pink to get behind Planned Parenthood. They sign online petitions, share activist videos, and retweet celebrities who take a political stand. They're willing to lift a finger for a cause -- mainly the one used to tap 'like' or 'share' or "retweet."

For years, biomedical researchers have suspected that a specific set of immune cells are responsible for causing disease in lupus patients, but until now they haven't known for sure one way or the other.

Young men's interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren't as interested in babies.

New Orleans, LA - A team of researchers from LSU Health New Orleans Schools of Public Health and Medicine and colleagues have developed the first index identifying and documenting concurrent but unrelated diseases among adolescents and young adults (AYA) with cancer in collaboration with investigators from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and cancer registries of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program.

LA JOLLA, CA -- The ebb and flow of intracellular calcium concentrations is a universal mode of communication in mammalian cells. Among a wide variety of functions that impact nearly every aspect of cellular life, calcium signaling regulates the activity of T cells, which are an integral part of any effective immune response.

Genes that act as brakes to stop the development of an aggressive form of leukaemia have been identified by researchers.

Their findings offer fresh insights into how to tackle the disease and could lead to new therapies that prevent relapses.

Scientists have found that two molecules - Hif-1alpha and Hif-2alpha - work together to stop the formation of leukemic stem cells in an aggressive type of blood cancer called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML).

Designers of Christmas cards used fine art on their products to divert attention away from concerns that that the festival was becoming too commercialised, a University of Exeter academic has found.

While heart-warming pictures of animals or festive decorations on Christmas cards may bring joy throughout December, few would consider these greetings to have great aesthetic merit. But Victorians were able to send each other Christmas cards created by respected artists, made to counter anxiety that growing consumerism was destroying sentiment.

On Monday 7 December the journal Nature Communications published the research findings of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Merck Research Laboratories (Merck is known as MSD outside the US and Canada) and Leiden University concerning an entirely new way of antagonizing a human nuclear receptor. The Eindhoven researchers expect the discovery to have significant impact in the world of drug research. Nuclear receptors are modulatory proteins that control numerous crucial bodily functions and thus also play a key role in many pathologies.

MiRNAs are a class of naturally occurring small non-coding RNAs that have been linked to biological possesses and diseases development. In the previous study, Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues have reported that expression profile of circulating miRNAs in human and other animals are the novel class of biomarkers for diagnosis of cancer and other diseases.

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have discovered unique muscle fibers in the soft palate of the mouth in both infants and adults. The fibers seem to be present in greater number in snorers and sleep apnea patients. The findings were recently published article in the Journal of Anatomy.

Variations in genes involved in normal bone development are associated with an 8-to 15-fold increased risk for osteonecrosis in young patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Children's Oncology Group investigators. The results were discussed today at the 57th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Multiple sclerosis patients continually lose the insulating myelin sheath that wraps around neurons and increases the speed of impulses in the central nervous system. Whenever neurons are demyelinated, OPCs migrate toward these cells and differentiate into mature, myelin-producing oligodendrocytes, but this process becomes less and less effective as people age.