Fat in the stomach may cause vitamin C to promote, rather than prevent, the formation of certain cancer causing chemicals, reveals research published ahead of print in the journal Gut.

Independent sequence and assembly of the six billion base pairs from the genome of one person ushers in the era of individualized genomics

The immune response is actively turned on to target and destroy foreign infectious elements, but in the interests of self-preservation, it is just as important to turn the immune system off to avoid damage to oneself by “friendly fire.” The fruit fly Drosophila has served as a good model for the induction of an innate immune response, pointing to conserved pathways and mechanisms. Recent work shows that the fly’s immune response is more subtly regulated and produces a wider range of responses than was thought possible even just a few years ago. In a study to be published this week in the premier open-access journal PLoS Biology, Young-Joon Kim and colleagues from Seoul, Korea show that the fly immune response is edited and repressed.