A male fly's sexual courtship of a female fly is a complicated business of tapping, singing, wing vibration, and licking, but a single gene is all that is needed to produce this complex behavior, according to new research published in this week's issue of the journal Cell.

The gene encodes the Fruitless protein. Male and female flies carry different versions of the fruitless protein, as a result of sex-specific splicing of the mRNA. The male form of Fruitless is critical for the male courtship ritual and males' preference for mating with females, as previous studies have shown.

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Max Planck researchers have succeeded in overcoming the law postulated by Ernst Abbe in 1873 for diffraction limited resolution in light microscopes. Stefan Hell and his co-workers have established a new law that promises unlimited resolution in fluorescence microscopy. Future applications range from the imaging of cell interiors to the measuring of lithographic structures in microchip manufacturing, and substantial improvements in the quantification of the reaction kinetics of organic molecules (Phys. Rev. Lett., April 15 and Phys. Rev. Lett. May 6).

In the latest version of the hide-and-seek game between pathogens and the hosts they infect, researchers have found that a virus appears to cloak itself with a recently discovered gene silencing device to evade detection and destruction by immune cells.

The report by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers in an article published in the June 2, 2005, issue of Nature may be the first to show how a virus uses the gene silencing machinery for its own infectious purposes.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have discovered a novel strategy by which the bacterium that causes tuberculosis may soon be able to resist the effects of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones. The finding explains why several disease-causing microbes, including Shigella and E. coli, are rapidly becoming resistant to fluoroquinolones.

Nature abounds with examples of bacteria that can thrive in extreme situations---surviving on toxic chemicals, for instance. In a paper published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) May 25, University of Michigan researchers show how some bugs manage to do that: by harnessing other potentially harmful chemicals known as free radicals to degrade the toxins they live on.

University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering researchers have discovered a new way to make a diesel-like liquid fuel from carbohydrates commonly found in plants.

Vaccine strategies are being designed to battle cancer, but their use for metastatic melanoma is a challenge. Effective vaccines against established tumors require tumor-reactive T cells to traffic to the sites of the tumors and are locally activated there in order to kill cancer cells. A problem is that the T cells lose their tumor-killing power once they reach the environment surrounding the tumor. This happens because T cells decrease stimulatory molecules including one called B7.1.

The immunodeficiency that arises in HIV may be due to excessive programmed cell death of immune CD4 T cells. HIV protease inhibitors (PI) can block programmed cell death in virus-infected T cells in vitro, but have also been shown to induce programmed cell death at higher concentrations. The mechanisms for these paradoxical data are unclear, as is whether PI therapy would aid CD4 T cell reconstitution in HIV patients in vivo.