Researchers at the South West Liver Unit, based at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust and supported by the Peninsula Medical School, are working to save more lives and improve the health of Hepatitis C sufferers around the world by developing a vaccine for the disease.

Nitrogen fertilization is essential for profitable corn production. It also is a major cost of production and can contribute to degradation of the environment. Is it possible to "teach" corn to fix its own nitrogen, thus eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizer applications? University of Illinois agricultural engineer Kaustubh Bhalerao believes it may be, through research in an emerging area of engineering called synthetic biology.

Two Dartmouth biologists have found that brown anole lizards make an interesting choice when deciding which males should father their offspring. The females of this species mate with several males, then produce more sons with sperm from large fathers, and more daughters with sperm from smaller fathers. The researchers believe that the lizards do this to ensure that the genes from large fathers are passed on to sons, who stand to benefit from inheriting the genes for large size.

In the long evolutionary road from bacteria to humans, a major milestone occurred some 1.5 billion years ago when microbes started building closets for all their stuff, storing DNA inside a nucleus, for example, or cramming all the energy machinery inside mitochondria.

Adding a new link to our understanding of the complex chain of chemistry that keeps living cells alive, a team of researchers from the University of Vermont (UVM), the University of Utah, Vanderbilt University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has demonstrated for the first time the specific activity of the protein NEIL3, one of a group responsible for maintaining the integrity of DNA in humans and other mammals. Their work reported last week* sheds new light on a potentially important source of harmful DNA mutations.