First-of-its-kind analysis published in the Feb. 8 PNAS supports the concept of a basic wiring diagram for all eukaryotes.

Researchers in California, Israel, and Germany have compared three distantly related species – baker's yeast, a worm, and the fruit fly – and reported that protein "wiring" connections in one species are often conserved in all three. This first-of-its-kind analysis of three higher level organisms published in the February 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports both the concept of a basic wiring diagram for all eukaryotic cells, and the idea that more selective pharmaceuticals could be designed to tweak the wiring plan of human cells to more effectively treat diseases while also generating fewer side-effects.

An amazing variety of arboreal animals have learned to glide through the forest, from flying squirrels to flying lizards and frogs, and even – frightening as it sounds – snakes.

Now, add ants to that list, say biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB).

Gliding ants – the only wingless insects known to actively direct their fall – were first observed last year outside Iquitos, Peru, by insect ecologist Stephen P. Yanoviak of UTMB. While perched 100 feet up in the rainforest canopy waiting for mosquitoes to alight and feed on his blood, Yanoviak casually brushed off a few dozen ants that were attacking him and noticed their uncanny ability to land on the tree's trunk and climb back to the very spot from which they'd fallen.

Amidst the hoopla over the exact number of genes we have in our genome—more than a fruitfly, fewer than a rice plant—a more fundamental genetic truth has often been obscured. The expression of 20,000–30,000 genes is under the control of an uncounted host of non-coding sequences, which bind transcription factors and thereby regulate when and where genes are expressed. Unlike coding sequences, whose signatures are easy to spot, the characteristic features of non-coding regulatory elements are largely unknown, making their discovery by simple sequence analysis difficult. In this issue, Greg Elgar and colleagues attack this problem by comparing the non-coding sequences of the human and the pufferfish.

The human mouth teems with millions of enamel-eroding, gum-inflaming microbes.

One of these, Porphyromonas gingivalis, is a bacterial homesteader that stakes a claim deep within the spaces between teeth and gums. It’s also the leading cause of tooth loss — secreting proteins that destroy the soft tissues and bone that support teeth to cause periodontal disease.

Now scientists have identified the thousands of proteins the bacterium produces, shedding light on how it interacts with healthy cells in order to thrive, according to dental researchers from the University of Florida and the University of Washington. They describe their findings in the current issue of the journal Proteomics.

The first evidence of cardiac progenitor cells – rare, specialized stem cells located in the newborn heart of rats, mice and humans – has been shown by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. The cells are capable of differentiation into fully mature heart tissue.

Called isl1+ cells, these cardiac progenitor cells are stem cells that have been programmed to form heart muscle during fetal growth. Until this new discovery, the cells were thought to be absent after birth. However, the UCSD team discovered a small number of the specialized stem cells remained embedded in a region of the newborn heart called the atrium. They also determined that the cells could be expanded into millions of progenitor cells by growing them on a layer of neighboring heart cells called fibroblasts.

Researchers have discovered an important chemical in the brain's neuronal machinery that triggers some of the withdrawal symptoms of opioid drugs like morphine and heroin.

They believe that drugs to inhibit the chemical--called a transporter--could relieve some of the early physical symptoms of withdrawal, such as teeth-chattering, uncontrolled shaking, and jumpiness. Such drugs could become part of the arsenal of medicines and behavioral techniques aimed at helping addicts kick their habits.

Sequence similarity searching is a powerful tool to help develop hypotheses in the quest to assign functional, structural and evolutionary information to DNA and protein sequences. As sequence databases continue to grow exponentially, it becomes increasingly important to repeat searches at frequent intervals, and similarity searches retrieve larger and larger sets of results. New and potentially significant results may be buried in a long list of previously obtained sequence hits from past searches.

ReHAB (Recent Hits Acquired from BLAST) is a tool for finding new protein hits in repeated PSI-BLAST searches. ReHAB compares results from PSI-BLAST searches performed with two versions of a protein sequence database and highlights hits that are present only in the updated database. Results are presented in an easily comprehended table, or in a BLAST-like report, using colors to highlight the new hits. ReHAB is designed to handle large numbers of query sequences, such as whole genomes or sets of genomes. Advanced computer skills are not needed to use ReHAB; the graphics interface is simple to use and was designed with the bench biologist in mind.

This software greatly simplifies the problem of evaluating the output of large numbers of protein database searches.

Affymetrix Inc. (Nasdaq: AFFX - News) and Karolinska Institutet announced today that they have entered into a strategic alliance designed to improve healthcare by accelerating the translation of basic genetic research into tools for better diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

During the next five years the projects include genetic analyses and measurement of gene expression in patients with atherosclerosis, breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and dyslexia. These diseases affect a large number of patients worldwide. Systematic use of the genomic information obtained will enable development of new and better clinical methods and drugs hereby reducing mortality and improving quality of life for patients suffering from these diseases.

The future of cancer treatment - targeted radiotherapy, on a cellular scale. Antibodies coupled to radioactive isotopes specifically seek out, bind to and kill cancerous cells. Provided that you can find something different on the cell surface between normal and cancerous cells; this is not as easy as it sounds.

A new form of treatment for lymphoma that takes a fraction of the time of traditional chemotherapy with fewer side effects caused tumors to shrink in 95 percent of patients, a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center found.

Patients with advanced-stage follicular lymphoma – a cancer generally considered incurable – who had not been previously treated with any other form of therapy received a single course of treatment with the Bexxar therapeutic regimen, a radioactive antibody injected into the bloodstream that targets and kills cancer cells. Of the 76 patients enrolled in the study, 95 percent responded to the treatment and 75 percent had a complete response, meaning no evidence of cancer remained. More than three-quarters of patients with a complete remission were disease-free after five years.

Results of the study appear in the Feb. 3 New England Journal of Medicine.

A geomicrobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis has proposed that evolution is the primary driving force in the early Earth's development rather than physical processes, such as plate tectonics.

Carrine Blank, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of geomicrobiology in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, studying Cyanobacteria – bacteria that use light, water, and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and biomass – has concluded that these species got their start on Earth in freshwater systems on continents and gradually evolved to exist in brackish water environments, then higher salt ones, marine and hyper saline (salt crust) environments.