A clinical trial to test different strengths of a vaccine designed to fight avian influenza will begin this month at Duke University Medical Center.

A novel enzyme in corn helps the plants defend themselves from voracious caterpillars by disrupting the insects' ability to digest food, and ultimately killing them, according to researchers. The enzyme could be used in tandem with other biological pesticides such as the Bt toxin to prevent the pests from developing resistance and making the toxin more effective.

This fluorescence micrograph shows phage-quantum dot complexes (bright spots) bound to E. coli cells (cylindrical shapes). The NCI/NIST method of tagging cells with quantum dots can be used to identify bacteria much faster than conventional methods. The fluorescence signal is strong and stable for hours, enabling scientists to count the number of phage viruses bound to a cell.A rapid method for detecting and identifying very small numbers of diverse bacteria, from anthrax to E. coli, has been developed by scientists from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in the March 28 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,* the work could lead to the development of handheld devices for accelerated identification of biological weapons and antibiotic-resistant or virulent strains of bacteria--situations where speed is essential.

Tyler Dunlap, a 27-year-old newlywed in San Francisco, is just one of the many American men eagerly awaiting the results of a large clinical trial in India.

While newly published research confirms that under laboratory circumstances prion-protein can be absorbed across the gut, it also shows that this is unlikely to occur in real life. In addition, the results show that the places in the gut that do take up these disease-associated proteins are different from the locations where infectivity is known to be amplified. The findings will be published in the Journal of Pathology.

An innovative new study explains, for the first time, the failure of previous attempts to vaccinate against the four known Dengue viruses, and it suggests a very simple solution – injecting the four vaccines simultaneously at different locations on the body.

Youth with superior IQ are distinguished by how fast the thinking part of their brains thickens and thins as they grow up, researchers at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered.

Results from a clinical trial demonstrate that high doses of an experimental H5N1 avian influenza vaccine can induce immune responses in healthy adults.

Oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, primarily caused by agricultural run-off and pollution, could spark the development of far more male fish than female, thereby threatening some species with extinction, according to a study published today on the Web site of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology. The study is scheduled to appear in the May 1 print issue of the journal.

The unchecked activity of a cell signaling pathway crucial in embryonic development and the liver's response to injury leads to liver cancer, researchers from Duke University Medical Center and John Hopkins University School of Medicine have found.