Carnegie Mellon University’s Justin Y. Newberg and Robert F. Murphy have developed a software toolbox that is intended to help bioscience researchers characterize protein patterns in human tissues.

A mutated gene has been discovered as the key behind epilepsy and mental retardation specific to women, thanks to new research at Adelaide’s Women’s & Children’s Hospital and the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Losing a limb can be a traumatic experience and, in some cases, emotional and physical pain can linger for years. To better understand the phenomenon, dubbed “phantom limb syndrome,” Université de Montréal graduate student Emma Duerden is inviting amputees to come forward and share their experiences for a major study.

Fruit flies are dramatically different from humans not in their number of genes, but in the number of protein interactions in their bodies, according to scientists who have developed a new way of estimating the total number of interactions between proteins in any organism.

X-ray spectroscopy shows that a protein acetate group (molecule at center) prefers binding with sodium (blue curve) over potassium (red curve); the green sphere represents a cation, with surrounding water molecules in white. Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, figure by Janel Uejio In the late 19th century the Czech scientist Franz Hofmeister observed that some salts (ionic compounds) aided the solution of proteins in egg white, some caused the proteins to destabilize and precipitate, and others ranged in activity between these poles.

Why do parasites harm their hosts? Classic evolutionary theory predicts that parasites become more virulent because they must transmit themselves between hosts, yet scientists have found little data to support this idea, until now.

Follow that fish -- threespine sticklebacks that were used in the experiments. For animals that live in social groups, and that includes humans, blindly following a leader could place them in danger.

While it has long been known that embryonic stem cells have the ability to develop into any kind of tissue-specific cells, the exact mechanism as to how this occurs has heretofore not been demonstrated. Now, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and elsewhere have succeeded in graphically revealing this process, resolving a long-standing question as to whether the stem cells achieve their development through selective activation or selective repression of genes.