New keys to understanding the evolution of life on Earth may be found in the microbes and minerals vented from below the ocean floor, say scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The UCSB scientists are making new contributions to this field of inquiry in their studies of seafloor hydrothermal fluid discharge into the Earth's oceans, which has been occurring ever since the oceans first formed four billion years ago. Conditions below the sea floor may most closely mimic the environment when life began.

Ever since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to establish the cause of a repulsive force occurring between different electrostatically charged molecules, such as DNA and other biomolecules, when they are very close to each other in aqueous media. This force became know as hydration force.

Jordi Faraudo, a researcher for the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and Fernando Bresme of the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London have studied this mysterious force in detail and have discovered where its origins lie.

In the same way that a flag flutters in the direction the wind is blowing, at a microscopic level water molecules are gently attracted towards the direction in which an electric field is pointing. However, when the water is in contact with surfaces that create small electric fields, such as chemical compounds like those found in many detergents, this is no longer the case: the water molecules have a remarkable capacity to organise themselves into complex structures that are strongly orientated in such a way as to cancel out the electric field, and on some occasions, to reverse it. This abnormal behaviour was discovered by the same researchers and published in Physical Review Letters in April 2004.

In a study published in the journal Blood, Yale scientists identify the molecular triggers that stimulate Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma (CTCL) cells to clonally expand into large populations of malignant lymphocytes.

CTCL is the most common adult malignancy of T lymphocytes, the white blood cells of the immune system. Finding CTCL triggering factors has been a major goal of Richard L. Edelson, M.D., Director of the Yale Cancer Center, and professor and chair of dermatology at Yale, since he and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute first identified CTCL as a separate category of lymphoma thirty years ago.

UCL scientists have found a protein that could unlock the secret to quicker, more effective treatment of TB by waking TB bacteria in the body. Once the TB bacteria are active again, the disease becomes treatable using common drugs like antibiotics. Scientists believe that uncovering the molecular structure of this protein will lead the way to designing drugs which enable treatment of dormant and multidrug resistant TB.

You could say that the Human Genome Project missed 99 percent of the genes in the adult body. That's because it didn't sequence genes belonging to the vast communities of bacteria that normally live on and in us.

Now a $1.45 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to researchers at the School of Medicine will help fill this gap by funding a study to develop new approaches for isolating, sequencing and analyzing the genomes of "friendly" bacteria that inhabit the intestine and identifying the natural metabolic products that they synthesize in their native gut habitats.