Researchers at The University of Manchester have been awarded £130,000 to develop new techniques to reduce the need for animals in drug testing.

A gene that makes cells in the eye receptive to light is missing in humans, researchers have discovered.

Whether or not a pregnant woman will give birth to a child with Down Syndrome is not simply a matter of how old she is. Although it is a fact that as women get older, they are more likely to have a child with Down Syndrome, other factors also play a role. According to Markus Neuhäuser and Sven Krackow, from the Institute of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology at University Hospital Essen, in Germany, the risk of a child being born with Down Syndrome is also dependent on how many existing siblings the child has and how big the gap is between the child and his immediate preceding sibling. The research is published in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften this week.

Guided by families with an unusual number of cases, scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered the genetic origins of at least one form of Fuchs corneal dystrophy, FCD, the leading reason for corneal transplantation in the United States.

Every cell constantly produces a whole arsenal of proteins. The instruction what is to be built comes from the cell nucleus: this is where the DNA is stored, the heredity molecule in which, so to speak, the construction blueprints for all cellular proteins are stored. If a particular protein is to be produced, the appropriate command is 'copied' in the cell nucleus. The copy consists of a DNA-like substance, the RNA. Via pores in the cell nucleus it reaches the cell plasma. The individual parts of the desired protein are put together there on a kind of assembly line. In this process the assembly line follows exactly the blueprint which is stored in the relevant RNA.

How to direct and control the self-assembly of nanoparticles is a fundamental question in nanotechnology.

Mitochondrial DNA may not hold the key to your origins after all. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that fewer than 10% of African American mitochondrial DNA sequences analysed can be matched to mitochondrial DNA from one single African ethnic group. There has been a growing interest in the use of mitochondrial DNA to trace maternal ancestries, and several companies now offer to analyse individuals' mitochondrial DNA sequences to obtain information about their origins. The current study suggests that only one in nine African Americans may be able to find clues about where their ancestors came from, in their mitochondrial DNA.

Defects in the growth process of our neurons often underlie brain or nerve diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease or multiple sclerosis. Scientists from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, led by Bassem Hassan, have achieved a major step in unraveling the growth process of axons, the offshoots of neurons. They have identified the JNK, Wnt and FGF signaling cascades as the most important actors and have also discovered their respective roles. Their research shows that the growth of axons and the activity of neurons are completely independent of each other. This new finding can lead to better understanding of a variety of nerve diseases.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Imperial College London, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, in Lima, Peru, and other institutions have developed a simple and rapid new tuberculosis (TB) test. The test, called microscopic-observation drug-susceptibility or MODS, is more sensitive, faster and cheaper to perform than current culture-based tests. The study is published in the October 12, 2006, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.