Researcher Kangling Zhang at the University of California, Riverside is part of a team that has discovered a new way that yeast governs genetic expression and repression, a finding that could be repeated in cells of other organisms.

By designing a molecular bridge, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have forged a successful pathway through a complex ocean of barriers: They've changed the function of a protein using a co-evolution approach.

In a study to be published in the Journal of Molecular Biology, doctoral student Zhilei Chen and Huimin Zhao, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, describe what they call a "simple and efficient method for creation of novel protein functions in an existing protein scaffold."

This finding, carried by the latest issue of the Japanese journal, Plant Cell Physiology, will enable the design of experiments aimed at enhancing vegetable species in the interest of humanity.

Bacteria acquired up to 90 percent of their genetic material from distantly related bacteria species, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

The finding has important biomedical implications because such gene-swapping, or lateral gene transfer, is the way many pathogenic bacteria pick up antibiotic resistance or become more virulent.

A first-of-its-kind multi-center trial has shown that cooling the body can have positive affects on children who suffered traumatic brain injury.

As the brain develops, neurons reach out helter-skelter forming new connections, only a small number of which take hold. How the brain chooses which connections to keep and which to prune back appears to be governed by which branches have the most electrical activity—a finding that could help to explain how early experiences guide brain development.

With microarray technology the expression of thousands of genes can be measured simultaneously. It is well known that the expression levels of genes of interacting proteins are correlated significantly more strongly in Saccharomyces cerevisiae than those of proteins that are not interacting. The objective of this work is to investigate whether this observation extends to the human genome.