Credits: AP Photo/Schalk van ZuydamA two-year joint ESA and UNESCO project to chart the habitats of endangered mountain gorillas with satellites came to a fruitful finish in Paris, with end-users receiving final maps and geographical data products for use in the field.

Microarray technology can be used to identify each stage of skin cancer tumor (melanoma) progression, according to a newly published report.

Created as an alternate route of drug administration to improve patient compliance and reduce drug side effects, prescription skin patches are rapidly becoming an important healthcare product category. While quietly gaining market share for the treatment of chronic conditions such as angina, hypertension and HRT, the technology is set to make further inroads as transdermal patches for a host of new conditions wind their way through the development and clinical trial process.

Microarrays provide a method of quantifying the expression and order of genes in a particular genome -- acting as a surrogate measure of cell physiology, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears online today in the journal Nature Genetics.

As of 7 April, 205 cases of Marburg haemorrhagic fever have been reported in Angola. Of these, 180 have died. Zaire Province has reported its first 6 cases, bringing the number of affected provinces to seven, all concentrated in the north-western part of the country.

For a virus to survive, it must elude the ever vigilant immune sentinels of its host. A latent virus can escape immune detection if it resides in nondividing cells and doesn’t produce any proteins. No viral proteins means no red flags for immune cells. If the virus targets one of the many cell types that rarely divide, it’s relatively safe while latent. But some viruses, like the gamma-herpesvirus, infect B cells of the immune system, which occasionally divide. The gamma-herpesvirus genome persists as circular pieces of DNA called episomes. When an infected B cell divides, the latent gamma-herpes virus episome must replicate and segregate into daughter cells along with the cell’s genome. Viral replication and segregation requires the services of a protein called the episome maintenance protein—a potentially recognizable target for immune cells.