Few stop to consider the consequences of their daily ablutions, the washing of clothes, the watering of lawns, and the flush of a toilet. However, wastewater treatment--one of the cornerstones of modern civilization--is the largest microbially-mediated biotechnology process on the planet. When it works, it is a microbial symphony in tune with humanity. When it fails, the consequences can be dire. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, University of Queensland, Australia, have published the first metagenomic study of an activated sludge wastewater treatment process. The research appeared online in the September 24 edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology (http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nbt1247.html).

An MIT team has discovered the most complicated knot ever seen in a protein, and they believe it may be linked to the protein's function as a rescue agent for proteins marked for destruction.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) are hoping a new gene therapy that takes a gene called RTVP-1 directly into the prostate tumor will prove effective in preventing recurrence of the disease.

When combined with an immune-boosting substance called an adjuvant, low doses of an experimental vaccine against a strain of avian influenza (H9N2) provoked a strong antibody response in human volunteers, report scientists supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

After years of research, scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center are now able to explain, in exquisite molecular detail, how the estrogen hormone can help keep breast cancer cells alive.

The flow of copper in the brain has a previously unrecognized role in cell death, learning and memory, according to research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers' findings suggest that copper and its transporter, a protein called Atp7a, are vital to human thinking. They speculate that variations in the genes coding for Atp7a, as well as other proteins of copper homeostasis, could partially account for differences in thinking among individuals.

Researchers have achieved an effective immune response to an avian influenza vaccine with doses as low as one-quarter of the norm when they added a chemical mixture known as MF59. The research is published in the November 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

The world's most widely used organic insecticide, a plucky bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt for short, requires the assistance of other microbes to perform its insect-slaying work, a new study has found.

An international group of researchers today unveiled a detailed map of human genetic variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), the most important region of the human genome encoding the human response to infection, autoimmune disease and organ transplantation. The work represents a milestone in the analysis of genetic variability for this fundamental immune region and lays the scientific foundation for future efforts aimed at uncovering the genetic roots of immune-related diseases. The findings of this international team, which includes scientists from the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI), the Université de Montréal (UdeM), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and several other research institutions, appear in the September 24 advance online edition of Nature Genetics.

Herpes virus has an unusual strategy for infecting cornea cells that may also explain how it evades the immune system, according to a study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine.

Eating spinach could protect your eyes from the leading cause of blindness in western society, say experts at The University of Manchester.