Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden, together with researchers at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, show in a new study how natural selection drives functional evolution of a large protein family in conifer trees. The study sheds light on the mechanisms and adaptive significance of gene family evolution. Most structural and regulatory genes in eukaryotes are members of gene families. Over the course of evolution, some duplicate genes are short-lived, losing functionality and ultimately being removed. However, some duplicates persist and diversify ...

This study suggests that genetically engineered malaria parasites that are stunted through precise gene deletions (genetically attenuated parasites, or "GAP") could be used as a vaccine that protects against malaria infection. This means that the harmless (attenuated) version of the parasite would interact with the body in the same way as the infective version, but without possibility of causing disease. GAP-vaccination would induce robust immune responses that protect against future infection with malaria. According to the World Health Organization, there were 219 million ...

Scientists from the University of Southampton have discovered that copper and copper alloys rapidly destroy norovirus – the highly-infectious sickness bug. Worldwide, norovirus is responsible for more than 267 million cases of acute gastroenteritis every year. In the UK, norovirus costs the National Health Service at least £100 million per year, in times of high incidence, and up to 3,000 people admitted to hospital per year in England. There is no specific treatment or vaccine, and outbreaks regularly shut down hospital wards and care homes, requiring expensive deep-cleaning, ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University used airbrushing techniques to grow vertically aligned carbon nanofibers on several different metal substrates, opening the door for incorporating these nanofibers into gene delivery devices, sensors, batteries and other technologies. "Because we're using an airbrush, this technique could easily be incorporated into large-scale, high-throughput manufacturing processes," says Dr. Anatoli Melechko, an adjunct associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. ...

HOUSTON – A family of microRNAs (miR-200) blocks cancer progression and metastasis by stifling a tumor's ability to weave new blood vessels to support itself, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report today in Nature Communications. Patients with lung, ovarian, kidney or triple-negative breast cancers live longer if they have high levels of miR-200 expression, the researchers found. Subsequent experiments showed for the first time that miR-200 hinders new blood vessel development, or angiogenesis, and does so by targeting cytokines interleukin-8 ...

Transplanting fat may treat such inherited metabolic diseases as maple syrup urine disease (MSUD) by helping the body process the essential amino acids that these patients cannot, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. The researchers are targeting maple syrup urine disease because it disproportionately affects the Amish and Mennonites who reside in the central Pennsylvania communities surrounding the College of Medicine and its hospital, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. The team transplanted up to two grams of fat into either abdomens ...

It's hard to fully understand a mental disease like schizophrenia without peering into the human brain. Now, a study by University of Iowa psychiatry professor Nancy Andreasen uses brain scans to document how schizophrenia impacts brain tissue as well as the effects of anti-psychotic drugs on those who have relapses. Andreasen's study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, documented brain changes seen in MRI scans from more than 200 patients beginning with their first episode and continuing with scans at regular intervals for up to 15 years. The study is considered ...

The benefits of hydroxyurea treatment in people with sickle cell disease are well known -- fewer painful episodes, fewer blood transfusions and fewer hospitalizations. Now new research from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and other institutions reveals that by preventing such complications, the drug can also considerably lower the overall cost of medical care in children with this condition. The cost-benefit analysis, described online Sept. 2 in the journal Pediatrics and believed to be the first of its kind in pediatric patients, showed that children whose standard ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- For small and midsize organizations, the outsourcing of demanding computational tasks to the cloud — huge banks of computers accessible over the Internet — can be much more cost-effective than buying their own hardware. But it also poses a security risk: A malicious hacker could rent space on a cloud server and use it to launch programs that hijack legitimate applications, interfering with their execution. In August, at the International Cryptology Conference, researchers from MIT and Israel's Technion and Tel Aviv University presented a new system that ...

This news release is available in Spanish and Spanish. Proteins are molecules involved in most of the biological processes that take place in our bodies. They have to move in order to fulfil many of their functions. For example, they open or close to keep and transport the molecules inside them. Until now, costly methods were the only available option for studying these movements: supercomputers were needed and the calculations took many days. The department of mechanics of the Faculty of Engineering in Bilbao has now developed a shorter method. On the basis of ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have figured out the specific job of a protein long implicated in tumors of the nervous system. Reporting on a new study described in the Sept. 12 issue of the journal Cell, they detail what they call the "matchmaking" activities of a fruit fly protein called Merlin, whose human counterpart, NF2, is a tumor suppressor protein known to cause neurofibromatosis type II when mutated. Merlin (which stands for Moesin-Ezrin-Radixin-Like Protein) was already known to influence the function of another protein, dubbed Hippo, but the particulars of that ...

Wildfires have broken out in four provinces in Argentina including forest land in Cordoba. The high temperatures and gusty winds have wreaked havoc on the growth of these wildfires and the local meteorologists predict more of the same conditions in the coming days. According to the Miami Herald: "Cordoba Social Development Minister Daniel Passerini said Tuesday that firefighters are having the toughest time in the central province (near Cordoba) with flames fanned by wind gusts and high temperatures. Passerini says the blaze in Cordoba province has caused the evacuation ...

Data obtained from NASA's TRMM satellite was used to create a 3-D image of Tropical Storm Gabrielle's rainfall that clearly showed wind shear pushed all of the storm's the rainfall east of its center. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as "TRMM" flew directly above tropical Storm Gabrielle on September 10, 2013 at 2124 UTC (5:24 p.m. EDT) as the storm approached Bermuda. TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) data found that rain was falling at a rate of over 127mm/~5 inches per hour in a line of intense storms southeast of Bermuda. TRMM PR also found ...

Firefighters faced extremely hot and dry conditions which contributed to more active fire activity with isolated flare-ups inside current containment lines. The fire is active in the Clavey River Reynolds Creek and Jawbone Creek drainages as well as to the west of Harden Lake, Harden Road and Tioga Road. Moderate fire spread to the northeast into Yosemite Wilderness areas north of Hetch Hetchy reservoir is expected. Unburned tinder within and adjacent to the fire perimeter continue to consume and create spotting near or across planned containment lines. As such the percent ...

LA JOLLA, CA—September 11, 2013—The largest DNA-sequencing study of anorexia nervosa has linked the eating disorder to variants in a gene coding for an enzyme that regulates cholesterol metabolism. The finding suggests that anorexia could be caused in part by a disruption in the normal processing of cholesterol, which may disrupt mood and eating behavior. "These findings point in a direction that probably no one would have considered taking before," said Nicholas J. Schork, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Schork was the senior investigator for the ...

Nearly 80 percent of trauma centers in the United States that serve predominantly minority patients have higher-than-expected death rates, according to new Johns Hopkins research. Moreover, the research shows, trauma patients of all races are 40 percent less likely to die — regardless of the severity of their injuries — if they are treated at hospitals with lower-than-expected mortality rates, the vast majority of which serve predominantly white patients. The findings, described in an article published in the October issue of Annals of Surgery, offer confirmation and ...

Exposing young women and girls under the age of 20 to ionizing radiation can substantially raise the risk of their developing breast cancer later in life. Scientists may now know why. A collaborative study, in which Berkeley Lab researchers played a pivotal role, points to increased stem cell self-renewal and subsequent mammary stem cell enrichment as the culprits. Breasts enriched with mammary stem cells as a result of ionizing irradiation during puberty show a later-in-life propensity for developing ER negative tumors - cells that do not have the estrogen receptor. Estrogen ...

NEW YORK (September 11, 2013) – Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) treatment in a hospital setting using low dose oral vancomycin showed similar effectiveness compared to high dose, according to a new study by researchers at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. These data were presented yesterday at the 53rd Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy meeting in Denver. Patients with CDI treated with vancomycin at the low dose (LD) (125 mg every 6 hours) and high dose (HD) (greater than ...

Boston, MA – A study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) found that brachytherapy treatment was associated with better cause-specific survival and overall survival in women with cervical cancer. The population-based analysis also revealed geographic disparities and decline in brachytherapy treatment in the United States. Brachytherapy is a type of cancer treatment in which radioactive implants are inserted directly into the tissue near the tumor site. The study is published in the September 2013 issue of The International Journal of Radiation Oncology. The ...

AMES, Iowa – It happens to all kinds of flat, disk galaxies – whether they're big, little, isolated or crowded in a cluster. They all grow out of their irregular, clumped appearance and their older stars take on the same smooth look, predictably fading from a bright center to a dim edge. Or, as Curtis Struck, an Iowa State University astronomer, wrote in a research summary: "In galaxy disks, the scars of a rough childhood, and adolescent blemishes, all smooth away with time." But how does that happen? Struck, a professor of physics and astronomy who studies galaxy ...

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society American Chemical Society presidential symposium: Innovation and entrepreneurship INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 10, 2013 — An historic shift is occurring in traditional innovation in chemistry — which touches more than 96 percent of all the world's manufactured goods — away from large companies and toward smaller entrepreneurs ...

High adherence to antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is associated with a high level of protection from HIV acquisition by HIV-uninfected partners in heterosexual couples where only one of the partners is HIV positive, according to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The study, which was led by Jessica Haberer, from Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States, included 1,147 HIV-uninfected participants who were enrolled in three Ugandan sites of the Partners PrEP Study- a randomized controlled trial to determine efficacy and safety of PrEP. ...

Transnational tobacco companies' investments in smokeless tobacco products, such as snus (a moist tobacco product that is placed under the upper lip), in Europe are not due to a concern for the health impacts of smoking but are instead driven purely by business interests according to new research by Silvy Peeters and Anna Gilmore from the University of Bath UK and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, published this week in PLOS Medicine. To inform the policy debate surrounding snus, which is banned from sale in the European Union (EU) under legislation that is ...

A team of researchers led by Professor Joseph Heitman has discovered procreation between genetically identical fungi Cryptococcus neoformans can result in genetic changes and diversity in their offspring, lending insight into how they can evolve to cause and spread disease. These results are published 10 September 2013 in the open access journal PLOS Biology. "These studies turn our view of the functions of sex by 180 degrees and reveal that sex doesn't just mix up already existing genetic diversity, but can actually create it from scratch," said Professor Heitman, Chair ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Though some might disagree, most biologists think the purpose of sex is to create diversity among offspring. Such diversity underpins evolution, enabling organisms to acquire new combinations of traits to adapt to their environment. However, scientists have been perplexed to find that many fungi and microorganisms procreate with exact replicas of themselves, where the expected outcome would simply be more of the same. Now researchers have found the act of sex between such genetically identical organisms can itself be mutagenic, meaning it can create ...