The FANTOM Consortium for Genome Exploration Research Group, a large international collection of scientists that includes researchers at The Scripps Research Institute's Florida campus, is reporting the results of a massive multi-year project to map the mammalian "transcriptome" in this week's issue of the journal Science.

UCL (University College London) scientists have found that the closest living relative to the extinct Irish Elk (giant deer) lives on our shores. The team tested for DNA and skeletal features to prove that the giant deer - which roamed across Europe and Siberia with prehistoric man and is the subject of numerous cave drawings - has its DNA in common with the fallow deer, one of the most widespread deer in the UK since their introduction by the Normans in the eleventh century.

Researchers have confirmed for the first time the benefit of an innate defense system present in the few patients who remain healthy after years of infection with HIV despite receiving no treatment, according to an article published in the September edition of the Journal of Virology. The study found that the subset of HIV-infected patients referred to as long-term survivors or nonprogressors have higher amounts of a key enzyme in their white blood cells. At the same time, a related biotech company is poised to begin preclinical testing on a drug designed to confer similar protection on most HIV patients.

About 60,000 Americans will be diagnosed with melanoma this year, says the American Cancer Society, and 10,000 of those cases will be fatal. If not caught in the early stages, melanoma can be a particularly virulent form of cancer, spreading through the body with an efficiency that few tumors possess. Now, researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have discovered one of the reasons why this particular skin tumor is so ruthless. Unlike other cancers, melanoma is born with its metastatic engines fully revved.

An international team of researchers has discovered that human embryonic stem cell lines accumulate changes in their genetic material over time.

Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the Institute of Biomedical Research of the Parc Cient�fic de Barcelona (IRB-PCB) have now added key evidence to claims that some types of cancer originate with defects in stem cells. The study, reported this week in the on-line edition of Nature Genetics (September 4) shows that if key molecules aren't placed in the right locations within stem cells before they divide, the result can be deadly tumors.