For someone with a severe, incurable lung disorder such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung transplant may be the only chance for survival. Unfortunately, it's often not a very good chance. Matching donor lungs are rare, and many would-be recipients die waiting for the transplants that could save their lives.

New research at the University of Leicester will use the latest genetic techniques to examine DNA from over 20,000 patients with heart disease.

EUREKA project E! 3371 Gene Transfer Agents has made great advances in the development of novel non-viral carriers able to introduce genetic material into the target cells. These new agents, derivatives of cationic amphiphilic 1,4-dihydropyridine (1,4-DHP), avoid the problems of the recipient's immune system reacting against a viral carrier. The project partners have developed methods to produce them in large amounts, which solves another of the problems with viral delivery. But the greatest advantage is that the new compounds are significantly more effective at delivering DNA into cell nuclei than other standard synthetic carriers; increasing the chance of the DNA successfully controlling the defective genes, and the disease.

For a plant, light is life. It drives everything from photosynthesis to growth and reproduction. Yet the chain of molecular events that enables light signals to control gene activity and ultimately a plant's architecture had remained in the dark. Now a team of researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Duke University have identified the courier that gives the signal to revamp the plant's gene expression pattern after photoreceptors have been activated by light.

Transposons, or "jumping genes," make up roughly half of the human genome. Geneticists previously estimated that they replicate and insert themselves into new locations roughly one in every 20 live births.