Research on adult stem cells found in the skin hints at a new class of genes, according to a study from investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. These genes – dubbed pangenes – can both govern a stem cell's fate and put a hold on future differentiation until the time is right. Understanding the molecular control of these genes has implications for therapies that involve tissue regeneration.

The researchers found that Pax3, a gene critical in embryonic development of melanocytes – cells that make and store the pigments in the skin and hair – is also expressed in adult stem cells in the skin.

New research from Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology finds that nanoparticles of gold and palladium are the most effective catalysts yet identified for remediation of one of the nation's most pervasive and troublesome groundwater pollutants, trichloroethene or TCE.

The research, conducted by engineers at Rice and the Georgia Institute of Technology, will appear next month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

A newly discovered plant protein complex that apparently switches on plants' growth machinery, has opened a scientific toolbox to learn about both plant and animal development, according Purdue University scientists.

The protein complex triggers communication between molecules along a pathway that leads to the creation of long protein strings, called actin filaments, that are necessary for cellular growth, said Dan Szymanski, agronomy associate professor and lead author of the study. Knowledge of the biochemical reactions involved in this process eventually may allow researchers to design plants better able to protect themselves from insects and disease.

"These genes and their proteins are required for normal development and for normal cell-to-cell adhesion," Szymanski said. "They affect the growth of the whole plant and also the shape and size of types of cells in the plant."

When the most common adult leukemia in the United States was last reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1995, it was seen through the eyes of theories that dated back to the 1960s. As such, the journal recently invited three of the world's foremost experts on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to write an authoritative update covering the transformation in the scientific community's knowledge of CLL that has occurred over the past decade. The review appears in the February 24 issue.

A cellular enzyme appears to play a crucial role in the manufacture of a protein needed for long-term memory, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor. In an earlier study, another team of NICHD researchers had shown that mBDNF is essential for the formation of long-term memory, the ability to remember things for longer than a day.

Two soil-dwelling strangers – a friend and a foe – approach a plant and communicate with it in order to enter a partnership. The friend wants to trade nitrogen for food. The foe is a parasite that wants to burrow in and harm the plant.

In a new finding published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at North Carolina State University have found that the two strangers communicate with the plant in very similar ways. The plant's responses to both friend and foe are also remarkably similar.

For the first time, scientists have replicated hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the laboratory. The ability to replicate HCV in cell culture will allow researchers to better study the life cycle and biology of this virus and to test potential antiviral compounds, which may lead to new therapies for the liver disease that results from infection with HCV. Scientists at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), conducted the study, which appears in the Feb. 15, 2005 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Scientists have uncovered new information that may help guide design of vaccines for HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS. A new detailed structural analysis of the complex formed by an anti-HIV antibody called 4E10 and its specific target provides insight into why this particular antibody is so broadly effective, a rare characteristic for HIV discovered thus far. The research is published in the February issue of Immunity.

With an incredible lifespan of up to 250 years the deep sea tube worm, Lamellibrachia luymesi is among the longest-lived of all animals, but how it obtains sufficient nutrient – in the form of sulfide - to keep going for this long has been a mystery. In a paper just published in the premier open-access online journal PLoS Biology, Erik Cordes and colleagues now provide a solution: by releasing its waste sulfate not up into the ocean but down into the sediments, L. luymesi stimulates the growth of sulfide-producing microbes, and ensures its own long-term survival.

In a new study, researchers present a “cautionary tale” about what may go wrong when using the fledgling science of proteomics to devise a diagnostic test for cancer.

In the February 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center detail why an experimental test intended to identify early ovarian cancer from a small sample of blood is unlikely to lead to a reliable clinical test right away.

After conducting repeated checks of the data that supported the test’s effectiveness, the researchers say their findings indicate that claims about the experimental protein-based assay are not biologically plausible.