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- Secrets of largest fish revealed

For the rats of Hamelin, it was the Pied Piper's tune. For the destructive sea lamprey of the Great Lakes, it's a chemical attractant, or pheromone, released by lamprey larvae living in streambeds. Following the pheromone trail, adults are drawn to streams favorable for spawning. Researchers have long wanted to identify the pheromone so it could be synthesized and used to control the sea lamprey, which laid waste to Great Lakes fisheries of lake trout and other species in the mid-20th century.

Researchers at Jefferson Medical College and at the Wadsworth Center in New York have identified a gene defect in mice resulting in a range of abnormalities, from cyclical hair loss and skin cancer to severe problems in normal skin development. The work may lead to improved treatments for skin injuries, including burns, and might have implications for diseases such as eczema and psoriasis, as well as certain cancers.

Scientists from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the University of Vermont have captured the first 3-dimensional (3D) atomic-resolution images of the motor protein myosin V as it "walks" along other proteins, revealing new structural insights that advance the current model of protein motility and muscle contraction. The culmination of four years of work, this collaboration among biochemists and structural biologists was selected as the cover story for the September issue of the scientific journal Molecular Cell.

University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemists have developed an approach that allows them to measure with unprecedented accuracy the strengths of hydrogen bonds in a protein. The scientists were then able to predict the function of different versions of the protein based on structural information, a novel outcome that was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a recent study, Dr. Ingolf Bach and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester and the University of Hamburg (Germany) describe a novel role for the ubiquitin/proteosome protein degradation pathway in the regulation of local actin dynamics in neurons.

nterferon -- a critical protein that mediates the body's defense against a wide variety of infectious agents and tumors -- may soon have greater therapeutic value as the result of a new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.