Scientists have made nisin, a natural antibiotic used for more than 40 years to preserve food, in a test tube for the first time using nature's toolbox. They also identified the structure of the enzyme that makes nisin and gives it its unique biological power.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that invasive exotic plants thrive because they escape the natural enemies that kept them in check in their native ranges, a new study in the journal Science suggests the opposite. Exotic plants that are in the presence of their natural enemies actually do better in their introduced ranges. The research from the Georgia Institute of Technology appears in the March 10, 2006 issue of the journal Science, published by the AAAS, the science society, the world's largest general scientific organization.

Within a hormone-triggered cascade of molecular signals that plays a crucial for a wide range of physiological functions, researchers for the very first time have identified a protein that functions specifically to extend lifespan and youthfulness -- without disrupting fertility, immunity or the organism's response to stress.

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) for infants born with HIV infection may be most effective when given in their first five months of life, according to a study published in the April 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Researchers at New York University's Center for Comparative Functional Genomics and the University of California, Berkeley have used computational analyses to predict a genome-wide map of microRNA (miRNA) targets in the animal model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). MicroRNAs bind to messenger RNA (mRNA) in a specific section, called 3'UTR, and are known to regulate them. Parts of the predicted map were confirmed through the development of a novel in vivo method that asked whether the 3' UTR part of mRNAs was driving regulation during development in a living organism. Their research appears in the most recent issue of Current Biology.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified an important circuit in the spinal cord that controls the speed with which our leg muscles contract and relax. Their findings mark an important milestone in understanding the neural circuitry that coordinates walking movements - one of the main obstacles in developing new treatments for spinal cord injuries.

Studying neotropical poison dart frogs, biologists at the University of Texas at Austin uncovered a new way that the frog species can evolve to look similar, and it hinges on the way predators learn to avoid the toxic, brightly colored amphibians.

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have launched a publicly-available microbial database to host a range of microbial genome sequences.