Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a biotech chip that mimics the metabolic reactions in the human liver, allowing rapid screening of potential drugs to identify those activated by the liver and to weed out those made toxic.

"The MetaChip would allow testing a backlog of compounds for toxicity earlier in the drug discovery process – faster and more efficiently – and help remove a current bottleneck in the drug discovery process," said Douglas S. Clark, professor of chemical engineering at UC Berkeley.

A simple drug, given to children with severe malaria before they reach hospital, has the potential to save many lives, say researchers in this week's BMJ.

Every year over a million children die of malaria in Africa. The majority of fatalities occur outside hospital, especially in rural areas. For those who do make it to hospital, half of deaths occur within 24 hours of admission.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, technology’s advance into the vanishingly small realm of molecules and atoms may not be out of sight for the venerable optical microscope, after all. In fact, research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that a hybrid version of the optical microscope might be able to image and measure features smaller than 10 nanometers—a tiny fraction of the wavelength of visible light.

In a preliminary test of the embryonic technique, NIST scientists used violet light with a wavelength of 436 nanometers to image features as small as 40 nanometers, about five times smaller than possible with a conventional optical microscope.

A team led by biologists at the University of California, San Diego has discovered a molecule in roundworms that makes them susceptible to Bacillus thuringiensis toxin, or Bt toxin--a pesticide produced by bacteria and widely used by organic farmers and in genetically engineered crops to ward off insect pests.

Their findings should facilitate the design and use of Bt toxins to prevent insects, which the researchers believe also possess the molecule, from developing resistance to Bt, extending the life of this natural pesticide.

B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is an incurable disease in which cells in the bone marrow grow and survive to the point where they become abnormal and malignant (leukemic). The progression of the disease is slow and there has been a lack of information regarding the rate of production of CLL cells, and the time-course of their death.

For years, doctors and scientists believed that CLL was a static disease of long-lived lymphocytes -- that the leukemia cells were both immortal and born at a slow rate, causing the slow rise in cell count over time. But researchers had been unable to find any problems with the programmed cell death machinery in CLL cells. This was a hint that perhaps the leukemia cells were not immortal, a hypothesis tested by Nicholas Chiorazzi and colleagues in a paper appearing online on February 10 in advance of publication in the March 1 print edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. This new study shows that leukemia cells are born at a fast rate and do indeed die. The slow rise in the cell count over time can be attributed to the difference between the birth and death rates of the cells, according to the study.

Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered an entirely new cellular "machine" in plants that plays a significant role in plant flowering and DNA methylation, a key chemical process essential for an organism's development.

A team headed by Craig Pikaard, Ph, D., Washington University professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has discovered a fourth kind of RNA polymerase found only in plants and speculated to have been a plant feature for more than 200 million years.

RNA polymerase is an enzyme, or protein machine, essential for carrying out functions of cells and for expression of biological traits. It does its job by copying a template of DNA genetic information in order to make RNAs that encode proteins or that function directly in the cell.