Scientists at the University of Leicester have published findings about a new advance in the study of major diabetes drug target.

Mostly hidden from the scrutiny of the naked eye, microbes have been said to run the world. The challenge is how best to characterize them given that less than one percent of the estimated hundreds of millions of microbial species can be cultured in the laboratory. The answer is metagenomics—an increasingly popular approach for extracting the genomes of uncultured microorganisms and discerning their specific metabolic capabilities directly from environmental samples. Now, some ten years after the term was coined, metagenomics is going mainstream and already paying provocative dividends according to a "Q&A," News and Views by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) microbial ecology program head Philip Hugenholtz and MIT researcher Gene Tyson, published in the 25 September edition of the journal Nature.

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) occur as a by-product of aerobic metabolism and impair cellular function by damaging proteins, nucleotides and lipids. Organisms possess a variety of anti-oxidant mechanisms to mitigate the effects of ROS, and the oxidative stress model of aging and senescence suggests that physiological performance declines with age due to lifetime accrual of ROS-induced damage and progressively limited anti-oxidant capacity. Hence, the onset, pace and duration of energetically-intense behaviors should affect lifetime kinetics of ROS-induced damage, anti-oxidant responses, physiological capacity and longevity. A new study examines how these traits in honey bees are affected by age and behavioral intensity (factors which can be experimentally decoupled via manipulation of colony demographics), and is the first to use such an approach to test the oxidative stress model of aging in a free-living organism.

The coordination of two systems are key for any horse to walk, trot, gallop or win a race. The first are the lower limbs, which allow the animal to move along on a "spring-like" tendon. The second is a complicated respiratory system, which allows a horse to take in one breadth for every stride they make while racing. For more than a decade a team of researchers has been working to unlock the secrets of equines. Their findings may provide a springboard for better muscular horse health, and a different approach to breathing devices for humans.

HBV infection remains a major health problem in the world. Several data have revealed that lamivudine can efficiently promote the treatment of hepatitis B. However, a long-term treatment of lamivudine leads to the emergence of lamivudine-resistant mutants (YMDD mutants), which hampers the anti-HBV therapy. Therefore, researches related to HBV lamivudine-resistant mechanism has been of great significance. Up to date, many researches using eukaryotic plasmids containing either one type of HBV YMDD mutant or wild-type strains, without specification of HBV genotype, were reported. However, serial plasmids containing a specific HBV genotype, such as genotype C, and lamivudine-resistant sequences, which will allow systematic studies on the combined effects of HBV genotype together with lamivudine-resistant mutations, have not been reported.

Microbiologically contaminated water plagues approximately 1.1 billion people in rural and peri-urban populations in developing countries. Roughly 2.2 million people without safe access to drinking water die each year from the consumption of unsafe water, and most of them are children under 5 years of age.

An international research team studying sound production in deep-sea fishes has found that cusk-eels use several sets of muscles to produce sound that plays a prominent role in male mating calls.

Life has been discovered in the barren depths of Rome's ancient tombs, proving catacombs are not just a resting place for the dead. The two new species of bacteria found growing on the walls of the Roman tombs may help protect our cultural heritage monuments, according to research published in the September issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.