A novel high-tech microscope will be brought to the marketplace, giving laboratories everywhere fascinating new insights into living organisms. EMBLEM Technology Transfer GmbH (EMBLEM), the commercial entity of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), announced today that it has signed a licensing deal with technological leader Carl Zeiss to commercialize a new technology called SPIM (Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy).

Scientists have discovered that a protein that was originally believed to be involved in tuberculosis antibiotic resistance is actually a "missing enzyme" from the biosynthetic pathway for an agent used by the bacteria to scavenge iron.

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and three other institutions are setting out to find what activates the spores in anthrax, the deadly bacterial infection that is back in the news.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have identified a newly emerging illness, named staphylococcal purpura fulminans. The disease begins as a respiratory tract infection, which then is infected by Staphylococcus aureus. The infection then moves to the lungs, making superantigens (bacterial toxins that activate large numbers of T cells), often leading to death due to hypertension and shock. Purpura fulminans has been identified in five cases in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., metropolitan area during 2000-2004, as described in the April 1, 2005 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. This new disease has also been determined in seven additional cases nationwide. Of the 12 known cases, only two patients have survived.

New York University biologists have uncovered how the innate immune system in mice's brains fights viral infection of neurons. The findings, published as the cover study in the latest issue of Virology, show that proteins in neurons fight the virus at multiple stages--by preventing the formation of viral RNA and proteins, and blocking the virus' release, which could infect other cells in the brain.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are exploring ways to develop new vaccines for a variety of illnesses using genetically modified adenoviruses, a common cause of respiratory infections. Oral adenovirus vaccines have long been proven to be safe and effective. The researchers believe their process for constructing a replicating live recombinant adenovirus could lead to more economical vaccines that provide longer-lasting disease protection, which would be particularly beneficial for people living in the developing countries where resources are limited. Their research was made available online March 14, 2005, in advance of publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As of 29 March 2005, the Ministry of Health has reported a total of 124 cases and 117 deaths in Cabinda, Luanda and Uige. All these cases had originated in Uige Province. Ten of these cases have been laboratory confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, USA.

The US Patent Office issued Patent # 6,872,552, "A Method of Reconstituting Nucleic Acid Molecules" today to Burt D. Ensley, Ph.D, Chairman of MatrixDesign, and CEO of DermaPlus, Inc. The patent covers methods for recovering and reconstituting genes from "degraded" DNA samples, and could allow scientists to reassemble everything from prehistoric, extinct animals to unsolved crime scenes.

A new study published in the March 30th edition of the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a publication of the UK's national academy of science) shows that the transfer of parasitic sea lice from salmon farms to wild salmon populations is much larger and more extensive than previously believed.

A molecule designed to block cat allergies successfully prevented allergic reactions in laboratory mice, as well as in human cells in a test tube, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers report in the April issue of Nature Medicine, available online now. In the future, the investigators say, these promising results could lead to a new therapy not only for human cat allergies, but also possibly for severe food allergies such as those to peanuts.

Along with Mark Musch, a longtime University of Chicago collaborator, Goldstein conducted an experiment with the red blood cells of skates to understand how these skinny, graceful fish can swim from salt water to fresh water. For humans, such a drastic environmental change would prompt an equally drastic physiological change: Our cells would take in too much water, diluting blood and other body fluids and rapidly causing death. So how do skates do it?

A "color-blind" method of fluorescence detection developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and Rice University could open new doors that would take DNA sequencing to the patient's bedside, the doctor's office and even the scene of a crime or a battlefield.

Research in the laboratory of Assistant Professor Frank J. Slack at Yale University has identified a new way that a familiar gene is regulated in lung cancer, presenting new possibilities for diagnosis and treatment. The work is reported in March issues of the journals Cell and Developmental Cell.

With the rapid advancement of biomedical science and the development of high-throughput analysis methods, the extraction of various types of information from biomedical text has become critical. Since automatic functional annotations of genes are quite useful for interpreting large amounts of high-throughput data efficiently, the demand for automatic extraction of information related to gene functions from text has been increasing.

More than a billion people are at risk for infection with filarial nematodes, parasites that cause elephantiasis, African river blindness, and other debilitating diseases in more than 150 million people worldwide. The nematodes themselves play host to bacteria that live within their cells, but in this case, the relationship is classic mutualism, with each benefiting from the other. Indeed, the Wolbachia bacterium is so crucial to its host nematode that apparently eradicating it with antibiotics severely compromises the nematode's ability to complete its life cycle within its human host. Thus, understanding the details of this relationship may help identify new strategies for controlling diseases caused by filarial nematodes. In a new study published in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology, Barton Slatko and colleagues present the complete DNA sequence of the Wolbachia pipientis strain within Brugia malayi, a parasitic nematode responsible for lymphatic filariasis.

A special type of MRI scan that measures the flow of water molecules through the brain can help doctors determine early in the course of brain cancer regimen if a patient's tumor will shrink, a new study shows.

Determining which variants of particular genes patients with epilepsy carry might enable doctors to better predict the dose of drugs necessary to control their seizures, suggest basic findings by researchers at the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and the University College London. Patients often undergo a lengthy process of trial and error to find the dose of anti-epilepsy drugs appropriate for them.

For the first time, a group of scientists has accomplished the daunting task of evaluating the status of all of the ecosystems on Earth, and the outlook is troubling.

Commissioned by the United Nations in 2001, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment program will issue its primary report on March 30 during press conferences in London, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, Brasilia, Cairo, Nairobi and Rome. More than 2,000 scientists from 95 countries participated in the assessment and concluded that the environmental benefits that human societies depend on and take for granted--basic necessities such as food, clean air, potable water and fuel--are rapidly being degraded.

Gene therapy methods that specifically target muscle may reverse the symptoms of a rare form of muscular dystrophy, according to new research in mice conducted by medical geneticists at Duke University Medical Center. Infants born with the inherited muscular disorder called Pompe disease usually die before they reach the age of two. The researchers also said their approach of targeting corrective genes to muscles may have application in treating other muscular dystrophies.

Mutated BRCA1 genes cause ovarian cancer indirectly, by interfering with the biochemical signals one ovarian cell sends to another, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

Their work is being published in the March 29 issue of the journal Current Biology.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have applied some of the same techniques used in medical imaging to track the distribution of nutrients in poplar trees in response to a simulated insect attack. The research provides new insights on a long-debated theory about how plants respond to environmental stress, and shows that radiotracer imaging can be a big help in unraveling plant biochemistry.

Like many other marine creatures, Aplysia, a common sea slug, enlists chemical defenses against its predators, but the mechanisms by which such chemical attacks actually work against their intended targets are not well understood by researchers. New work has now shown that such chemical defenses can involve modes of trickery that had not previously been appreciated as components of chemical defense.

Hemoglobins, key components of our blood, are ancient proteins with well-known roles in oxygen transport and respiration in animals. Hemoglobins are also present in plants and bacteria, but until now the physiological role of plant hemoglobins has been unclear. A group of researchers reveal this week that one such mysterious plant hemoglobin serves to assist in the fixation of nitrogen in the root nodules of legumes through a process that is conceptually not unlike that undertaken by mammalian hemoglobins in facilitating oxygen transport and exchange in the blood.

The recent killer tsunami has highlighted once more the importance of coastline protection. In natural conditions, this function is taken up by mangroves, forests thriving at the edge of land and sea that are ecologically and socio-economically important for local people in tropical countries on all continents. Using biology, geography, hydrology, socio-economic interviews, and 18th-century history, an international team led by Dr. Farid Dahdouh-Guebas has demonstrated that in the recent past an increase in human-environment interactions that affect the hydrology of rivers has turned coastal mangrove lagoons into freshwater bodies.

It's all in the packaging. How nature wraps and tags genes determines if and when they become active, according to researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). They did the largest, most detailed study to date of the protein structure that surrounds the human genome.

A vital molecular step in cell migration, the movement of cells within the body during growth, tissue repair and the body's immune response to invading pathogens, has been demonstrated by researchers in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. Published in the March 27 online edition of Nature Cell Biology and the journal's upcoming April print edition, the study describes how a the interaction of alpha4 integrin adhesion receptor with a protein called paxillin creates directional movement of a cell by inhibiting a protein called Rac.

As you read this, cells in your eye are transmitting information to your brain, while cells in your heart and arteries work just as hard to keep that brain alive. Every one of these cells -- and others throughout the body -- depends on an internal process called endocytosis to keep the flow of cellular nutrients and information healthy and strong.

Scientists at Affymetrix, Inc. (Nasdaq: AFFX) reported today in Science magazine online that they have completed a high-resolution scan of structure and function for nearly 30 percent of the human genome sequence. In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the research team used high-density GeneChip(R) microarrays to study every fifth base, on average, of 10 human chromosomes; they found that thousands of regions of the genome are transcribed into overlapping RNA sequences and those sequences are separated by regions in which RNA is transcribed more scarcely. All of the data is freely available.

Two compounds that zero in on cancer cells spreading throughout the body, while ignoring primary tumor cells, could someday give doctors a whole new weapon in the fight against tough-to-treat metastatic disease, according to Weill Medical College of Cornell University researchers.

The largest, most comprehensive study ever done comparing the effectiveness of hand hygiene products shows that nothing works better in getting rid of disease-causing viruses than simply washing one’s hands with good old-fashioned soap and water.

In what sounds like a modern-day version of the David and Goliath story, University of Michigan scientists hope to slay a big killer with pebbles. In this case, the killer is not a fearsome giant, but a dreaded disease: cancer. And the pebbles are not the kind you hurl from slingshots; they're nanoscale polymer beads known as Photonic Explorers for Biomedical use with Biologically Localized Embedding (PEBBLEs).

Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today's Nature, further supports the idea that vocal learning is important for maintaining individual social relationships among animals that separate and reunite over time, like dolphins and whales, some birds, and bats.

Natural killer (NK) immune system cells can be genetically modified to brandish a powerful "on-switch" that prompts them to aggressively attack and kill leukemic cells. This finding, from researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, suggests a way to improve the outcome of children who receive treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) or other blood cancers.

Results of the St. Jude study are published in the current online issue of Blood.

The growth and maintenance of human embryonic stem cells in the absence of contaminated animal products has been demonstrated by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine researchers in the Whittier Institute, La Jolla, California.

Every protein--from albumin to testosterone (Ed : testosterone isn't a protein, it's a steroid)--is folded into a unique, three-dimensional shape that allows it to function properly. Now Stanford University scientists have developed a simple test that instantly changes color when a protein molecule attached to a gold nanoparticle folds or unfolds. The new technique, which works on the same principle as ordinary pH tests that measure the acidity of water, is described in the March 2005 issue of the journal Chemistry and Biology.

Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report a surprising finding about embryonic development: the blood system begins to form not only in the embryo itself, but also in the placenta, the organ that nurtures the baby in utero.

For all its promise, the prospect of using nanoparticles in biomedical applications and consumer products has raised concerns about possible harmful effects of the miniscule materials. Scientists at the University of Michigan are addressing those concerns by investigating how certain kinds of nanoparticles damage cell membranes—enough to cause cell death in some cases—and how the damage can be prevented.

Nanogen, Inc. (Nasdaq: NGEN), developer of advanced diagnostic products, announced today that it was issued U.S. Patent No. 6,867,048, "Multiplexed Active Biologic Array" by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The '048 patent relates to a method of addressing one or more electrodes (or "test sites") across multiple rows and columns of a microarray. The patent also covers a method for storing the value of the voltage associated with each electrode in a local memory. This "smart chip" technology is a key feature of Nanogen's NanoChip(R) 400 electronic microarray, the company's second generation multi-purpose system for developing and performing molecular diagnostic tests.

Scientists at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine have discovered the cause of a deadly type of secondary stroke known as cerebral vasospasm.

Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today's Nature, further supports the idea that vocal learning is important for maintaining individual social relationships among animals that separate and reunite over time, like dolphins and whales, some birds, and bats.