Offering free HIV tests instead of charging a small fee is more cost-effective at preventing HIV infections and draws in three times as many people for testing, according to a Duke University Medical Center study conducted in Tanzania.

For the first time, researchers can now peer inside intact cells to not only identify RNA-binding proteins, but also observe–in real-time–the intricate activities of these special molecules that make them key players in managing some of the cell's most basic functions. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who developed the new technology see this advance as one of the next logical steps in genomics research. Senior author James Eberwine, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology at Penn, and colleagues published their research this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In an article appearing online today in the journal Nature Methods, researchers at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) unveil a powerful new tool that will facilitate genetic research and open up new avenues for the clinical treatment of genetic disease.

Carnegie Mellon University scientist Chien Ho and his colleagues have developed a promising tool that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track immune cells as they infiltrate a transplanted heart in the early stages of organ rejection. This pre-clinical advance, described in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ultimately could provide a non-invasive way to detect transplant rejection in patients.

A University of New South Wales (UNSW) researcher based at the Diabetes Transplant Unit (DTU) at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital has produced a human embryonic stem cell (hESC) line without the use of any animal products. The breakthrough eliminates the risk of animal-to-human contamination in potential stem cell therapy treatments.

A large, clawed frog is helping Oregon Health & Science University researchers gather a princely sum of knowledge on Fanconi anemia, a rare, genetic, cancer-susceptibility syndrome.

In the continuing battle against antibiotic resistance, two new studies shed light on the complex defense mechanisms pathogenic bacteria use to evade antibiotic attack, an understanding of which could lead to new, more effective antibiotics to help save lives and combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. The studies, both of which target chemical components in the protective membrane surrounding bacterial cells, will appear in the February 17 inaugural print issue of ACS Chemical Biology, a new monthly publication of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

A fascinating new study from the forthcoming issue of The American Naturalist attempts to explain the mysterious persistence of two forms of females in many diving beetle populations. Their findings have important implications for theories of sexual conflict, which arises when the costs and benefits of multiple matings differ for males and females.

The location of a piece of real estate may be its most important feature to many Realtors, and bioengineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Virginia have reported that the location of genes and other features distributed along the chromosomes of bacteria and simpler organisms also is fundamentally important to how microbial cells operate.