How do insects smell? Badly, according to a new study, if they lack a certain kind of protein critical to their ability to detect and interpret pheromones – the insect equivalent of "smelling." Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how a protein, called an olfactory binding protein, links incoming pheromone signals and specific nerve cells in an insect's brain, which in turn translate those signals. Pheromones are chemical signals given off by animals that, when detected by others of the same species, mediate a variety of behaviors, such as feeding, mating and colonizing.

A novel antiviral treatment combining nanoparticle and gene silencing technologies thwarts attacks of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- a virus associated with severe bronchitis and asthma, an animal study by University of South Florida researchers found. The study was reported in the January 2005 issue of the journal Nature Medicine. RSV infects lung cells and can be life-threatening in very young children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. No vaccine or widespread antiviral treatment is available for the infection.

The first study to examine the probability of HIV infection per act of heterosexual sex among a population with multiple sexual partners has found that uncircumcised men have more than twice the risk of acquiring HIV than do circumcised men. In the study, published in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, Jared Baeten and colleagues from the United States and Kenya collected detailed sexual data from a group of male Kenyan truckers and, using statistical models, developed infectivity measures that estimate the per-sexual-act probability of HIV transmission. The study is the first to calculate the probability of infection for men who have multiple, concurrent heterosexual partners, which was found to be significantly higher than infectivity rates calculated in the past from studies of monogamous couples. Their results may help explain the rapid spread of HIV in settings where circumcision is not common and multiple sexual partnerships are.

Sacramento - Today, Affymetrix, Inc. announced plans to make eight new GeneChip(R) plant and animal genome arrays available in 2005 as part of its Consortia Program, including canine, Rhesus macaque, Medicago trancatula (legume), Brassica, tomato, citrus, poplar and sugar cane. More than 20 research presentations at this week's Plant and Animal Genome Conference XIII in San Diego, Calif. feature Affymetrix arrays launched in 2004 under the Consortia Program.

Wired published an article about the fundamental problems brought by patents and trade secrets in Life Science, especially in biotechnology. Basically, they impede progress by restricting access to key technologies. Its very frustrating, especially when coupled to the fact that most of the time you don't have access to everything that is published in subscription-based journals.You can read about it here.

For everyone doing or reading a paper about microarray-based experiments, reproductibility, especially inter-lab, is the #1 concern. Can I trust these results? If I redo the same experiment in one month, will I be able to compare both? The NIH recently demonstrated that microarrays experiments performed in different labs "have a high degree of reproducibility, as long as standardized protocols are carefully followed". Good news for the scientific community (and the microarrays producing companies)! A study funded by the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, shows for the first time that microarray data generated in different laboratories can produce highly comparable results. For this comparison study, appearing in the Jan. 15, 2005, Clinical Cancer Research*, four separate laboratories analyzed gene expression (whether genes are turned on or off) for the same set of human tumor tissues. Overall, the expression profiles of portions of individual samples were highly comparable, and the experimental correlation between separate labs was only slightly lower than correlation of duplicated experiments within the same labs.