When nerve cells excite muscle fibers to flex, getting synaptic proteins and components into the right place can mean the difference between feats of strength or lapses of drowsy lethargy.

For the first time, scientists have engineered yeast cells capable of producing a broad repertoire of recombinant therapeutic proteins with fully human sugar structures (glycosylation). These sugar structures ensure a glycoprotein's biological activity and half-life and to date, have necessitated the expression of therapeutic glycoproteins in mammalian hosts. The accomplishment reported today has the potential to eliminate the need for mammalian cell culture, while improving control over glycosylation, and improving performance characteristics of many therapeutic proteins.

People who must stay awake for long shifts – soldiers, pilots, truckers, students, doctors, parents of newborns – may take comfort from new research showing that preventing the gas nitric oxide from building up in the brain may ward off the sleep urge.

Padana, a young female orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo, who was one of the research subjects. How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors. However, in a study recently published in Current Biology (September 5, 2006), researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology were able to find answers to these questions using an alternative research method: comparative psychological research. In this way, they discovered that some of the strategies shaped by evolution are evidently masked very early on by the cognitive development process unique to humans.

In a paper published yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), researchers from Boston University School of Dental Medicine generated a mouse model exhibiting reduced inflammation.

Boston College chemists have discovered a substance that will make it possible for scientists to produce scores of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals in a faster, less expensive way.

Three separate studies confirm a gene that suppresses tumor cell growth also plays a key role in aging. The researchers found increasing concentration, or expression, of the gene p16INK4a in older cells; these aging cells worked poorly compared to young cells and remembered their "age" even when transferred from old mice to young mice. The cells of mice bred without the gene showed less sluggishness as the animals aged and continued to function in a manner more similar to cells from younger mice.

Researchers in Houston, Texas have found two bacterial muscle infections common in tropical countries becoming more frequent occurrences along with the emergence of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), according to a study published in the Oct. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Although it's unclear why it's so, scientists at Johns Hopkins have linked a gene that allows for the chemical breakdown of the tough, protective casing that houses insects and worms to the severe congestion and polyp formation typical of chronic sinusitis.