Scientists who have studied the genome of the virus that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) say their comparisons to related viruses offer new evidence that the virus infecting humans originated in bats.

The doctor who wouldn’t come into the patient’s hospital room. The neurologist who avoided eye contact. The ambulance attendant who angrily threw her bloodied gloves into the street after learning the injured patient was HIV-positive.

Findings: A single microRNA, microRNA-223, in mice controls the production and activation of granulocytes, white blood cells essential for host defense against invading pathogens.

Scientists at the University of York have characterised an important new step in the mechanism used by bacteria to evade our immune system.

A study published in PLoS Medicine this week suggests that of women who die during pregnancy and childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa, more may die from treatable infectious diseases than from conditions directly linked to pregnancy.

A new way of generating brain cells has been uncovered in Drosophila. The findings, published this week in the online open access journal Neural Development, reveal that this novel mode of neurogenesis is very similar to that seen in mammalian brains, suggesting that key aspects of neural development could be shared by insects and mammals.

Researchers have developed the first animal model of the infection caused by chikungunya virus (CHIKV), an emerging arbovirus associated with large-scale epidemics that hit the Indian Ocean (especially the French Island of La Réunion) in 2005, later spreading to India, and Italy in 2007. Using this mouse model, scientists of the Institut Pasteur and INSERM determined which tissues and cells are infected by the virus in both the mild and severe forms of the disease it causes. They detail their findings in an article published February 15 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.

The UK Stem Cell Foundation, the Medical Research Council and Scottish Enterprise, in partnership with the Chief Scientist’s Office, are funding a £1.4 million project to further the research at the University of Edinburgh with a view to setting up a clinical trial within two years.

Previous work from this group of scientists, led by Tracy Hussell at Imperial College, London, showed that recovery from flu infection left mice unusually vulnerable to infection with pneumonia-causing bacteria. Components of these bacteria normally trigger receptors on immune cells in the lung. These signals result in the recruitment of other immune cells into the lung that help destroy the bugs. But in post-flu mice, these receptors were not triggered by bacteria and remained shut off for up to six months.

Imagine a gigantic, inflatable, sausage-like bag capable of storing 160 million tonnes of CO₂ – the equivalent of 2.2 days of current global emissions. Now try to picture that container, measuring up to 100 metres in radius and several kilometres long, resting benignly on the seabed more than 3 kilometres below the ocean’s surface.

Continued mismanagement could force some tuna populations to quickly go the way of cod, a highly threatened fishery that once helped shape economies of whole nations, leading scientists said in the symposium “Last Best Chance for Tuna: Learning from the Cod Collapse” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Boston on February 18.