Washington, DC -- In four different studies presented at the American College of Gastroenterology's (ACG) 76th Annual Scientific meeting in Washington, DC, researchers explored the effectiveness of probiotics for antibiotic-associated diarrhea; as an anti-inflammatory agent for patients with ulcerative colitis, psoriasis and chronic fatigue syndrome; and for people with abdominal discomfort and bloating who have not been diagnosed with a functional bowel disorder, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

A team of scientists at Tufts University will develop ultra-sensitive techniques at the single-molecule and single-cell levels designed to detect breast cancer earlier, and treat it with greater precision, through a $6.6 million Innovator Award from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program made to Tufts chemist David R. Walt, Ph.D.

During human evolution our ancestors mated with Neanderthals, but also with other related hominids. In this week's online edition of PNAS, researchers from Uppsala University are publishing findings showing that people in East Asia share genetic material with Denisovans, who got the name from the cave in Siberia where they were first found.

A vampire-like bacteria that leeches onto specific other bacteria – including certain human pathogens – has the potential to serve as a living antibiotic for a range of infectious diseases, a new study indicates.

A research team led by investigators at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute has demonstrated the first rapid measurements of dopamine release in a human brain and provided preliminary evidence that the neurotransmitter can be tracked in its movement between brain cells while a subject expresses decision-making behavior.

In 2009, the DNA alphabet expanded. Scientists discovered that an extra letter or "sixth nucleotide" was surprisingly abundant in DNA from stem cells and brain cells.

This is a schematic of a neuromuscular junction (NMJ). The most common form of heritable cognitive impairment is Fragile X Syndrome, caused by mutation or malfunction of the FMR1 gene. Loss of FMR1 function is also the most common genetic cause of autism. Understanding how this gene works is vital to finding new treatments to help Fragile X patients and others.

A technique developed by Johns Hopkins surgeons is providing a new route to get to and remove tumors buried at the base of the skull: through the natural hole behind the molars, above the jawbone and beneath the cheekbone.

The pigmented cells called melanocytes aren't just for making freckles and tans. Melanocytes absorb ultraviolet light, protecting the skin from the harmful effects of the sun. They also are the cells that go haywire in melanoma, as well as in more common conditions as vitiligo and albinism.

Sedimentary rocks from Grand Canyon, USA, show evidence for widespread anoxic and sulfidic waters 750 million years ago. "We have investigated the cycling of molybdenum (Mo) in ancient oceans by studying the elemental and isotopic composition of Mo in sedimentary rocks from Grand Canyon that formed in the oceans 750 million years ago", explains Tais W. Dahl, who did this research in collaboration with researchers from Arizona State University, Harvard University and the Nordic Center of Earth Evolution in Denmark (NordCEE).

Scientists have discovered more about the intricacies of the immune system in a breakthrough that may help combat viral infections such as HIV.

Women with cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) may be at increased risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke even when no conventional risk factors for CVD are present.

A study by researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco shows that rats given a popularly prescribed antidepressant during development exhibit brain abnormalities and behaviors characteristic of autism spectrum disorders.

This is a tobacco budworm (Heliothis virescens). Toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria (Bt toxins) are used in organic and conventional farming to manage pest insects. Sprayed as pesticides or produced in genetically modified plants, Bt toxins, used in pest control since 1938, minimize herbivory in crops, such as vegetables, maize or cotton. Since 1996, Bt producing transgenic crops have been grown, which successfully control pests like the European corn borer, the tobacco budworm, the Western corn rootworm, and the cotton bollworm. Over the years, Bt resistant insects have emerged in organic and conventional farming. Scientists have therefore modified the molecular structure of two Bt toxins, Cry1Ab and Cry1Ac, in order to overcome resistance. The novel toxins, Cry1AbMod and Cry1AcMod, are effective against five resistant insect species, such as the diamondback moth, the cotton bollworm, and the European corn borer. Cry1AbMod and Cry1AcMod can be used alone or in combination with other Bt toxins for plant protection.

A new treatment for the deadly Hendra virus has proven successful in primate tests — a major step forward in combating the virus, which kills about 60 percent of those it infects and has been implicated in sporadic outbreaks in Australia ever since it was first identified in 1994.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) may be alleviated by the anti-cancer drug Rituximab, suggesting that the source of the disease could lie in the immune system, according to a new study published Oct. 19 in the online journal PLoS ONE. Uncertainty about the cause of CFS, which is characterized by extreme, unexplained exhaustion, among other symptoms, has led to much debate, but the authors of this recent study believe they may have found the answer.

Timing is everything when treating patients with both HIV and tuberculosis. Starting HIV therapy in such patients within two weeks of TB treatment, rather than two months as is the current practice, increases survival by 33 percent, according to a large-scale clinical trial in Cambodia led by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and the Immune Disease Institute (IDI).

As planktonic organisms the larvae of the marine annelid Platynereis swim freely in the open water. They move by activity of their cilia, thousands of tiny hair-like structures forming a band along the larval body and beating coordinately. With changing environmental conditions the larvae swim upward and downward to their appropriate water depth. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany have now identified some signalling substances in the larval nervous system regulating swimming depth of the larvae. These substances influence the ciliary beating and thus hold the larvae in the preferred water depth. The scientists discovered a very simple circuitry of nerve cells underlying this regulation, reflecting an early evolutionary state of the nervous system.

Scientists have successfully demonstrated that they can build some of the basic components for digital devices out of bacteria and DNA, which could pave the way for a new generation of biological computing devices, in research published today in the journal Nature Communications.

This is an electron microscope image of two crawling worm sperm magnified ~5,000X. For better and for worse, human health depends on a cell's motility –– the ability to crawl from place to place. In every human body, millions of cells –are crawling around doing mostly good deeds ––– though if any of those crawlers are cancerous, watch out.

Autism researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing have found a link between low birthweight and children diagnosed with autism, reporting premature infants are five times more likely to have autism than children born at normal weights.

The South China Center for Innovative Pharmaceuticals, Sun Yat-Sen University, and BGI, the world's largest genomic organization, announced that they were among the research organizations from China, US and UK comprising an international research group that completed the genome sequence and comparison of two non-human primate animal models - Chinese rhesus macaque and cynomolgus. The study is published today online in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

There are more bacteria living on our skin and in our gut than cells in our body. We need them. But until now no-one knew how the immune system could tell that these bacteria are harmless.

Thanks to Hollywood, piranhas have a bad reputation and it would be a brave scientist that chose to plunge their hand into a tank of them. But that didn't deter Sandie Millot, Pierre Vandewalle and Eric Parmentier from the University of Liège, Belgium. 'You just have to pick them up and they make sounds,' says Parmentier. However, it wasn't clear when and why piranhas produce sounds naturally. Intrigued by fish acoustic communication and the mechanisms that they use to generate sound, the team monitored the behaviour of small groups of captive red-bellied piranhas and publish their discovery that the fearsome fish have a repertoire of three combative sounds in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

This is an image of a giant pterosaur, Coloborhynchus New research from the Universities of Portsmouth and Leicester has identified a small fossil fragment at the Natural History Museum, London as being part of a giant pterosaur – setting a new upper limit for the size of winged and toothed animals.

This research, published on Oct. 12 on the Nature review website, provides evidence of a major concept could pave the way for the future use of these stem cells to treat humans, through perspective gene therapies. For several years now, scientists have been able to produce cells with stem cell properties, by using specialized and mature cells from our body, such as skin cells. These 'iPS' stem cells are said to be "pluripotent': they can provide specialized cells, upon demand, with the same gene pool as the original cells. iPS cells represent a potential basis for the exploration of several therapeutic areas, particularly transplants or gene therapy. However, to date research conducted on these cells had not provided proof of their potential in vivo efficiency for the aforementioned types of use.

National Institutes of Health-funded scientists have corrected sickle cell disease in adult laboratory mice by activating production of a special blood component normally produced before, but not after, birth.

Recognizing other individuals from their voices is second nature to humans. Certain primates also have this ability. Whether other mammals that live in social groups are also able to do so, however, is unclear. Like with primates, vocal communication is vital for meerkats. They coordinate their activities with calls, such as to warn other group members of approaching predators, for instance, and thus stick together as a group. Behavior biologists from the University of Zurich have already managed to decipher many calls in meerkat communication. Now, however, they have become the first to establish that meerkats are able to distinguish individual calls.

Researchers at National Jewish Health have identified cells and signaling molecules that trigger the repair of injured lungs. Stijn De Langhe, PhD, and his colleagues report October 10, 2011, online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, that destruction of lung tissue in mice induces smooth muscle cells surrounding the airways to secrete a protein known as fibroblast growth factor 10 (FGF10), which induces surviving epithelial cells in the airways to revert to a stem-cell state, proliferate, repair and repopulate the lining of the lungs.

In the new study researchers studied actinomycete bacteria, known sources of clinical antibiotics and anticancer agents. A newly developed method for microscopically extracting, or "mining," information from genomes could represent a significant boost in the search for new therapeutic drugs and improve science's understanding of basic functions such as how cells communicate with one another.

The picture shows the structure of a norovirus (40 nm in diameter), the one causing winter vomiting disease, with 12 of the 180 glycan-binding sites indicted with green circles. A new method for quickly identifying individual viruses and recognising how they bind to host cells may become a vital tool in the early control of winter vomiting disease and other virus-based diseases. In the west, this means saving money and reducing stress on health-care systems. In developing countries, this means saving lives. The method has been jointly developed by researchers at Chalmers and the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have today (07/10/2011) announced a new technique to reprogramme human cells, such as skin cells, into stem cells. Their process increases the efficiency of cell reprogramming by one hundred-fold and generates cells of a higher quality at a faster rate.

Research by biologists at the University of York and Hull York Medical School has revealed important new information about the way the brain is affected by age.

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land. McMenamin will be presenting the results of his work on Monday, 10 October at the Annual Meeting of The Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers – along with collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals – have found a way to block, in an animal model, the damaging inflammation that contributes to many disease conditions. In their report receiving early online publication in Nature Biotechnology, the investigators describe using small interfering RNA technology to silence the biochemical signals that attract a particular group of inflammatory cells to areas of tissue damage.

An international team of researchers has discovered the first DNA faults linked to melanoma - the deadliest skin cancer - that are not related to hair, skin or eye colour.

All cells in our body have a system that can handle cellular waste and release building blocks for recycling. The underlying mechanism is called autophagy and literally means "self-eating". Many cancer cells have increased the activity of this system and the increased release of building blocks equip the cancer cells with a growth advantage and can render them resistant towards treatment.

Given the stakes of in vitro fertilization, prospective parents and their doctors need the best information they can get about the eggs they will extract, attempt to fertilize, and implant. New research at Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island has found a way to see which genes each egg cell is expressing without harming it. As researchers learn more about how those genes affect embryo development, the new technique could ultimately give parents and doctors a preview of which eggs are likely to make the most viable embryos.

Early detection and diagnosis of open angle glaucoma important so that treatment can be used in the early stages of the disease developing to prevent or avoid further vision loss. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, researchers in the US have analyzed and ranked the various risk factors for open angle glaucoma so that patients can be screened at an earlier stage if they are more likely to develop the condition.

The long-standing consensus of why insects stick together after mating has been turned on its head by scientists from the University of Exeter. Published today (6 October) in Current Biology, their study shows that, contrary to previous thinking, females benefit from this arrangement just as much as males.