Increasing the production of naturally occurring proteins that contain selenium in human blood cells slows down multiplication of the AIDS virus, according to biochemists.

A Swedish research group, partly financed by NWO, has discovered a new mechanism for cell division in a microorganism found in extremely hot and acidic conditions. The results of the research offer insights into evolution, but also into the functioning of the human body. The research has been recently published in PNAS, the magazine of the American National Academy of Sciences. Thijs Ettema, member of the research group, received a Rubicon grant from NWO in 2006 to gain experience abroad.

Scientists at Penn State have shed light on some of the processes that regulate genes -- such as the processes that ensure that proteins are produced at the correct time, place, and amount in an organism -- and they also have shed light on the evolution of the DNA regions that regulate genes. The team focused on regulatory regions that, when bound to the protein GATA1, are thought to turn on genes that play an important role in the development of red blood cells. "Our findings could help others to develop drugs to treat people who suffer from sickle-cell anemia and other blood disorders," said Ross Hardison, the T. Ming Chu Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the team's leader. The results will be published on 1 December 2008 in the journal Genome Research.

SARS – severe acute respiratory syndrome – alarmed the world five years ago as the first global pandemic of the 21st century. The coronavirus (SARS-CoV) that sickened more than 8,000 people – and killed nearly 800 of them – may have originated in bats, but the actual animal source is not known.

In human relationships, a certain "spark" often governs whether we prefer one person to another, and critical first impressions can occur within seconds. A team lead by Johns Hopkins researchers has found that cell-to-cell "friendships" operate in much the same way and that dysfunctional bonding is linked to the spread of cancer.

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported.

A Mayo Clinic study shows a majority of stroke patients don't think they're having a stroke -- and as a result -- delay seeking treatment until their condition worsens. The findings appear in the current issue of Emergency Medicine Journal at http://emj.bmj.com/.

LA JOLLA, CA—November 24, 2008—Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have figured out how a macromolecular machine is able to unwind the long and twisted tangles of DNA within a cell's nucleus so that genetic information can be "read" and used to direct the synthesis of proteins, which have many specific functions in the body.

Bacterial decay was once viewed as fossilization's mortal enemy, but new research suggests bacterial biofilms may have actually helped preserve the fossil record's most vulnerable stuff -- animal embryos and soft tissues.

Scientists have identified a gene critical to lung maturation in newborns and the production of surfactant, which lines lung tissues and prevents the lungs from collapsing.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have reported for the first time that mammals can be stimulated to regrow inner nerve cells in their damaged retinas. Located in the back of the eye, the retina's role in vision is to convert light into nerve impulses to the brain.

A single hit on the head by the termite Termes panamensis (Snyder), which possesses the fastest mandible strike ever recorded, is sufficient to kill a would-be nest invader, report Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven, post-doctoral fellows at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Rudolf Scheffrahn from the University of Florida.

Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Elly Nedivi, associate professor of neurobiology at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and colleagues found that a type of neuron implicated in autism spectrum disorders remodels itself in a strip of brain tissue only as thick as four sheets of tissue paper at the upper border of cortical layer 2.

MIT researchers have shown how a cell motor protein exerts the force to move, enabling functions such as cell division.

An international consortium‡ of researchers has begun an effort to sequence the genome of the domesticated turkey, Meleagris gallopavo. The genome sequence will be obtained using the Roche GS-FLX™ sequencing platform and the recently launched Roche GS FLX Titanium PicoTiterPlate device and reagents.

A new study found that adolescents were at the greatest risk of smoking when their parents began smoking at an early age and the parents' smoking quickly reached high levels and persisted over time.

Despite broad "dolphin safe" practices, fishing activities have continued to restrict the growth of at least one Pacific Ocean dolphin population, a new report led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has concluded.

NYU School of Medicine researcher Dr. Danny Reinberg was awarded a Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine Collaborative Innovation Award for new research on ant epigenetics- helping to unravel the impact lifestyle and environment have on genes. The research will investigate what ants can teach us about aging and behavior. Results of the ant study may translate to other species including humans, using gene regulation in ants as a model for aging.

A study performed by the team of Dr. Nabil G. Seidah, Director of the Biochemical Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the IRCM, shows for the very first time that the degradation by PCSK9 of the LDLR receptor, which is responsible for removing the bad cholesterol (LDL-cholesterol) from the bloodstream, may be inhibited by a third protein, annexin A2. This major discovery co-authored by Gaétan Mayer, a postdoctoral fellow, Steve Poirier, a doctoral student, and Dr. Seidah was published on November 14 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC).

Female flies can turn back the biological clock and extend their lifespan at the same time, University of Southern California biologists report.

There was something peculiar about dolphins that stumped prolific British zoologist Sir James Gray in 1936.

Physicians and policy-makers know that drugs are frequently prescribed to treat certain diseases despite a lack of FDA approval — a practice known as off-label prescribing. Yet they say the problem is so big they don't know how to begin tackling it.

Flip open any biology textbook and you're bound to see a complicated diagram of the inner workings of a cell, with its internal scaffolding, the cytoskeleton, and how it maintains a cell's shape. Yet the fundamental question remains, which came first: the shape, or the skeleton?

Most of what we know about bird populations stems from surveys conducted by professional biologists and amateur birdwatchers, but new research from North Carolina State University shows that the data from those surveys may be seriously flawed – and proposes possible means to resolve the problem.

In 430 B.C., a new and deadly disease—its cause remains a mystery—swept into Athens. The walled Greek city-state was teeming with citizens, soldiers and refugees of the war then raging between Athens and Sparta. As streets filled with corpses, social order broke down. Over the next three years, the illness returned twice and Athens lost a third of its population. It lost the war too. The Plague of Athens marked the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece.

Women who are exposed to hairspray in the workplace during pregnancy have more than double the risk of having a son with the genital birth defect hypospadias, according to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

A virus that causes cold-like symptoms in humans originated in birds and may have crossed the species barrier around 200 years ago, according to an article published in the December issue of the Journal of General Virology. Scientists hope their findings will help us understand how potentially deadly viruses emerge in humans.

Keeping germs from cooperating can delay the evolution of drug resistance more effectively than killing germs one by one with traditional drugs such as antibiotics, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

Singapore researchers have developed an unlimited number of pure insulin-producing cells from mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs).

A recent study appearing in the November issue of Journal of American Geriatrics Society revealed that centenarian offspring (children of parents who lived to be at least 97 years old) retain important cardiovascular advantages from their parents compared to a similarly-aged cohort. The study is the first to assess the health of centenarian offspring over time and could be important for future research, as the subjects may be used as a model of healthy aging.

In decisions about where to eat, baboons don't all have an equal say, according to a report in the November 20th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Rather, most baboons in a group will follow their leader to a dining spot of his choosing, even if it means a considerably more meager meal for themselves than they could have had otherwise.

A new discovery challenges one of the strongest arguments in favor of the idea that animals with bilateral symmetry—those that, like us, have two halves that are roughly mirror images of each other—existed before their obvious appearance in the fossil record during the early Cambrian, some 542 million years ago. In the November 25th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, researchers report the first evidence that trace fossils interpreted by some as the tracks of ancient bilaterians could have instead been made by giant deep-sea protists, like those that can still be found at the seafloor to this day.

For the first time it is now possible to get a comprehensive overview of which alien species are present in Europe, their impacts and consequences for the environment and society. More than 11,000 alien species have been documented by DAISIE (Delivering Alien Invasive Species Inventory for Europe), a unique three year research project with more than 100 European scientists, funded by the European Union that provides new knowledge on biological invasions in Europe. Biological invasions by alien species often result in a significant loss in the economic value, biological diversity and function of invaded ecosystems.

The DNA in our cells is constantly under assault from oxygen, the sun's radiation and environmental stresses. Most of the time, our cells can repair the damage before it gets copied into a permanent mutation that could lead to cancer.

Scientists report the discovery of a new species of Ebola virus, provisionally named Bundibugyo ebolavirus, November 21 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens. The virus, which was responsible for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in western Uganda in 2007, has been characterized by a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia the Uganda Virus Research Institute; the Uganda Ministry of Health; and Columbia University.

A team of researchers at Duke University Medical Center and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) has found that lactic acid is an important energy source for tumor cells. In further experiments, they discovered a new way to destroy the most hard-to-kill, dangerous tumor cells by preventing them from delivering lactic acid.

• Tissue engineering has made possible this doubly innovative operation - the first trachea transplant and the first tissue transplant to be performed without the need for immunosuppression.
• Professor Paolo Macchiarini, Head of the thoracic surgery department of Hospital Clínic has led the basic research and the international team formed by the universities of Bristol, Padua and Milan, who contributed to this success.
• The transplanted tissue is a hybrid from a donor that was repopulated with stem and epithelial cells from the recipient. Five months later, Claudia Castillo, who required the operation to save a lung following tuberculosis, is in perfect health.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas are pioneering the use of spatial statistical modeling to analyze brain scan data from Persian Gulf War veterans, aiming to pinpoint specific areas of the their brains affected by Gulf War Syndrome.

The highly specialized worker castes in ants represent the pinnacle of social organization in the insect world. As in any society, however, ant colonies are filled with internal strife and conflict. So what binds them together? More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin had an idea and now he's been proven right.

A ban on fast food advertisements in the United States could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 percent, according to a new study being published this month in the Journal of Law and Economics. The study also reports that eliminating the tax deductibility associated with television advertising would result in a reduction of childhood obesity, though in smaller numbers.