Bryan Grieg Fry, Ph.D., a scientist from the University of Melbourne, Australia, has conducted the first comprehensive analysis of the origin and evolution of one of nature's most sophisticated bioweapons: snake venom. His results are reported in the March issue of the journal Genome Research.

As the microbial world comes to light through DNA sequencing, the new Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) will deliver valuable information for the benefit of the global research community.

"The IMG system is an essential enhancement to the computational toolkit supported by DOE," said Dr. Aristides A. Patrinos, Associate Director for Environmental and Biological Research of the DOE Office of Science. "IMG responds to the urgent need of handling the vast and growing spectrum of datasets emerging from genome projects taken on by the DOE JGI and other public DNA sequencing centers. It is our hope that the IMG system will enable our scientists to tap the rich diversity of microbial environments and harness the possibilities that they hold for addressing challenges in environmental cleanup, medicine, agriculture, industrial processes, and alternative energy production."

Interventional cardiologists from Columbia University Medical Center have shown that a commonly used procedure to remove fatty debris from blocked arteries during a heart attack does not improve patient outcomes.

The procedure, called distal microcirculatory protection, is commonly and successfully used during angioplasty in vein grafts and stenting in carotid arteries. The study, published in the March 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the devices were successful in removing debris from the arteries in angioplasties during heart attacks, but it showed that there was no benefit to the patient.

The first synthesis of QS-21A, a medicinally important molecule that helps the body battle disease, has been achieved by chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In clinical trials, QS-21A has been shown to significantly improve the body's immune response in vaccine therapies against aggressive diseases such as melanoma, breast cancer, small-cell lung cancer, prostate cancer, HIV-1 and malaria. An extract from the bark of the South American tree Quillaja saponaria Molina, QS-21A is available only in small quantities.

We have much to learn from bad bugs, according to Gilbert Waldbauer, whose book "Insights From Insects: What Bad Bugs Can Teach Us" was published March 1 (Prometheus Books).

"We know a lot about pests, because so much money is spent on their research," said Waldbauer, professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Of the 900,000 known species of insects, a mere 2 percent are considered pests. Just as some plants growing where they are not wanted are considered weeds, insects are considered pests only when they adversely affect people, Waldbauer writes.

A working group of virologists headed by Professor Hans-Georg Kräusslich at Heidelberg University Hospitals, jointly with Professor Hanswalter Zentgraf, Division of Applied Tumor Virology of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ), have been the first to label Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV) for visual investigations without inhibiting the functional characteristics of the virus.

The labeling permits scientists to observe the behavior of the virus when it enters a host cell, during replication and when it leaves a cell. This is a major step towards understanding the process of HIV infection.

A new species of black coral has been discovered off southern California, including around the Channel Islands, by Milton Love, University of California, Santa Barbara marine researcher, and Mary Yoklavich of NOAA Fisheries. The discovery came during dives by the researchers in "Delta," the submersible.

The new species, found at depths of approximately 300 to 725 feet, is reported this week in the online scientific journal Zootaxa (http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/content.html) by taxonomist Dennis Opresko of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Sixty million people in 36 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are threatened daily by a deadly parasitic disease known as African sleeping sickness. The disease is caused by organisms called trypanosomes, which are spread by the tsetse fly. African sleeping sickness affects approximately 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, a quarter of whom will die this year. Because the trypanosome has an exceptional genetic strategy for evading the human immune system and resisting treatment, the current treatment for this disease is melarsopal, an antiquated drug with terrible side effects, including death.

In the February issue (Volume 17, Issue 3) of the journal Molecular Cell, scientists in the Marine Biological Laboratory's (MBL's) Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution report their discovery of a protein called JBP2, which will help them test their hypothesis that a uniquely modified DNA base called base J is a key component of the trypanosome's mechanism for evading the immune system. If the hypothesis is correct, it will bring scientists closer to developing a more effective drug for treating African sleeping sickness.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, NASA, and other institutions announced at a telephone press conference today the discovery of a method to determine from outer space the productivity of marine phytoplankton—a breakthrough that may provide a new understanding of life in the world's oceans.

The new approach is based on the premise that the "greenness" in phytoplankton, its level of pigmentation per cell, is a reflection of its growth rate, said David Siegel, professor of geography and director of the Institute for Computational Earth System Science at UCSB. The researchers have discovered a means, by satellite, to measure the biomass of phytoplankton from ocean light-scattering properties, and to infer growth rates from simultaneous measurements of the greenness of the individual phytoplankton cells.