Researchers are closer to developing therapies to combat the deadly tularemia infection, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' online Early Edition. Karl Klose, director of the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (STCEID) at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), says his lab collaborated with researchers at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and Thomas Jefferson University in a study that discovered that Francisella tularensis makes an essential metabolic molecule, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), using a different process and different enzyme from all other living organisms.

Most animals, like humans, have separate sexes — they are born, live out their lives and reproduce as one sex or the other. However, some animals live as one sex in part of their lifetime and then switch to the other sex, a phenomenon called sequential hermaphroditism. What remains a puzzle, according to Yale scientists, is why the phenomenon is so rare, since their analysis shows the biological "costs" of changing sexes rarely outweigh the advantages.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are one gene closer to understanding schizophrenia and related disorders. Reporting in the Jan. 9 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team describes how a variation in the neuregulin 3 gene influences delusions associated with schizophrenia.

A delay in traffic may cause a headache, but a delay in the nervous system can cause much more. University of Missouri researchers have uncovered clues identifying which proteins are involved in the development of the nervous system and found that the proteins previously thought to play a significant role, in fact, do not. Understanding how the nervous system develops will give researchers a better understanding of neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disorders.