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.