Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."

The common flea can carry Rickettsia felis bacteria in its cells How do you study a pathogen that can't survive outside its host's cells? In a new study published in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Hiroyuki Ogata and colleagues show that sequencing and analyzing the genome of the bacteria Rickettsia felis provide valuable insights into the biology and behavior of this intracellular pathogen. The researchers discovered that the parasitic bacterium has the standard large circular chromosome plus two unexpected plasmids, small circular pieces of DNA that can replicate on their own. This discovery may lead to novel techniques for study. "The newly identified plasmids may become a basis of a new tool, such as for efficiently producing rickettsial proteins," explains Ogata.

Doctors have become increasingly concerned by the problem of "super-bugs" - bacteria that have become resistant to standard antibiotics. It is well known that a high rate of antibiotic prescribing in hospitals contributes to the emergence of drug resistant bacteria. But for some antibiotics, an even more important factor contributing to such emergence, argues a team of researchers in the open access international medical journal PLoS Medicine, is the use of antibiotics in agriculture.

According to folklore, Polynesians originated from a mythical homeland called Hawaiki. Their origins and the existence of such a place, however, have been the subject of much speculation. In a new study in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology, Jean Trejaut and colleagues now provide the first direct evidence for the common ancestry of Polynesians and indigenous Taiwanese.

GoMiner, an application that organizes lists of 'interesting' genes (for example, under- and overexpressed genes from a microarray experiment) for biological interpretation in the context of the Gene Ontology.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have identified for the first time a group of genes that impact the development and function of blood stem cells, a discovery that brings researchers a step closer to harnessing the power of stem cells for disease treatments.

Rutgers University will lead a new $52.7 million research program that will help reveal the roles that proteins play in life's most fundamental processes and point the way to designing new medicines. Under the direction of Rutgers Professor Gaetano Montelione, the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium (NESG) will conduct the five-year undertaking.