Three genomic tests separately predict the likelihood that a patient's breast cancer will reoccur after surgery without additional treatment, and the cancer's vulnerability to chemotherapy or hormone therapy, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report at the first American Society of Clinical Oncology ASCO Breast Cancer Symposium Sept. 7-8 in San Francisco.

Colour contrast is detected much earlier in the brain than previously thought, a new study shows.

In the Institute of Molecular Virology of the GSF – National Research Center for Environment and Health in Neuherberg/Munich (Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres) the group is continuing to search for cellular components whose make-up is changed as a result of a prion infection. In collaboration with colleagues from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg, the group used micro-array technologies – micro-arrays are chips with thousands or tens of thousands of DNA or protein probes - and could demonstrate that the expression of endogenous retroviruses is influenced by infectious prion proteins in tests with mouse cells.

Virological evidence cannot prove transmission in HIV criminal cases, warn experts in this week’s BMJ.

Trypanosoma are a nasty class of single-celled parasites that cause serious, even fatal, diseases in human and animals. Two species cause sleeping sickness, a disease that threatens all of sub–Saharan Africa. There’s a catch though: one parasite, Trypanosoma brucei brucei (T. b. brucei), infects animals but seems to spare humans, and scientists haven’t quite understood why.