Infantile hemangiomas, exemplified by the strawberry-like patches that appear on the skin of infants soon after birth, are benign tumors that develop in 5%-10% of Caucasian infants and usually disappear by the age of 9 without treatment. Joyce Bischoff and colleagues, at Children's Hospital Boston, have now identified the cells that give rise to these tumors and used them to develop a new mouse model of this disease.

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech and the National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa, and collaborators at 454 Life Sciences of Branford, Conn., have sequenced the genome of Brucella abortus strain S19. Strain S19 is a naturally occurring strain of B. abortus that does not cause disease and was discovered by Dr. John Buck in 1923. It has been used for more than six decades as vaccine that protects cattle against brucellosis, an infectious disease caused by other strains of B. abortus that leads to reproductive failure in livestock.

One of the most critical processes in biology is the transcription of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA), which provides the blueprint for the proteins that form the machinery of life. Now, researchers have discovered new details of how the cell's major transcriptional machinery, RNA polymerase II (Pol II), functions with such exquisite precision. With almost unerring accuracy, Pol II can select the correct molecular puzzle piece, called a nucleosidetriphosphate (NTP), to add to the growing mRNA chain, although these puzzle pieces can be highly similar molecules.

For an organism to develop and function, the individual cells must exchange information, or communicate, with each other. Is it possible to learn their language and "talk to" the cells?

Genetic analyses of the feces could prove to be a promising approach when investigating otter populations, as researchers have written in the scientific journal Conservation Genetics. Researchers of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research have developed two new methods, in order to be able to better estimate the numbers of European Otters (Lutra lutra) and their effects on the fish farming industry.