Experts have disabled a unique member of the signalling proteins which are essential for the development of the malaria parasite. They have produced a mutant lacking the ancient bacterial Shewanella-like protein phosphatase known as SHLP1 (pronounced shelph). This mutant is unable to complete its complex life cycle and is arrested in its development in the mosquito. The discovery could help in the design of new drugs to arrest the spread of this killer disease. SHLP1is critical to the cellular development of the malaria parasite. It can be found at every stage in the ...

Technology developed at The University of Nottingham has been used in a breakthrough study aimed at developing the first comprehensive model of a fully functioning fetal heart. The abdominal fetal ECG device, designed originally by academics in the University's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and on commercial sale throughout the world since 2008 through the University spin-out company Monica Healthcare Ltd, has been used to observe living fetal hearts of babies in their mothers' wombs. The collaborative study led by experts at The University of ...

URBANA -- Developing strategies to increase the amount of saleable product while reducing dietary inputs is a priority for animal scientists. University of Illinois researchers have been looking at how dietary components affect gut health and disease resistance in chickens. "An important nutritional outcome is how well an animal is able to digest and metabolize its diet," said Ryan Dilger. Poultry and swine nutritionists are concerned about dietary fiber in alternative dietary ingredients, particularly the by-products of biofuel production. Fiber concentrations are ...

MIAMI – February 25, 2013 -- In a study published today in Nature Climate Change researchers used the latest emissions scenarios and climate models to show how varying levels of carbon emissions are likely to result in more frequent and severe coral bleaching events. Large-scale 'mass' bleaching events on coral reefs are caused by higher-than-normal sea temperatures. High temperatures make light toxic to the algae that reside within the corals. The algae, called 'zooxanthellae', provide food and give corals their bright colors. When the algae are expelled or retained ...

Cambridge, Mass. – February 25, 2013 – "People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," says Harvard applied physicist David Keith. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to "run out" on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry. Yet the latest research in mesoscale atmospheric modeling, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, suggests that the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms has been overestimated. Each wind turbine creates behind it a "wind shadow" ...

Even dying stars could host planets with life - and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. "In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs," said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ...

Chicago (February 25, 2013): Women who have had the lymph nodes under their arm surgically removed during breast cancer treatment are warned to avoid certain practices that can cause lymphedema—a condition that causes chronic, painless swelling in the arm. Now, a new study published in the March issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons suggests that the vast majority of women who undergo breast cancer operations worry about developing this complication and that this fear far exceeds their actual risk of getting lymphedema. In fact, most women adopt four ...

As part of the study, scientists sampled the presence of 20 species of birds both near and far from 30 rural residences in the Adirondack Park. Calculating their occurrence at increasing distances from the residences, they determined that "human-adapted" species are 36 percent more likely to occur near the homes than in the surrounding mixed hardwood-conifer forests, and that "human-sensitive" species were 26 percent less likely. Beyond 200 meters, occupancy rates were similar to the surrounding forest. The report appears in the current online edition of the Journal of ...

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have identified what may be a major factor behind the increased risk of two adverse outcomes in pregnancies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Two papers published in the journal Fertility and Sterility support the hypothesis that extremely high estrogen levels at the time of embryo transfer increase the risk that infants will be born small for their gestational age and the risk of preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can threaten the lives of both mother and child. They also outline a protocol that reduced ...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have identified a new so-called pseudogene that regulates the tumour-suppressing PTEN gene. They hope that this pseudogene will be able to control PTEN to reverse the tumour process, make the cancer tumour more sensitive to chemotherapy and to prevent the development of resistance. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, can be of significance in the future development of cancer drugs. The development of tumours coincides with the activation of several cancer genes ...

An international team of researchers has found that a once-a-month, high-dose injection of a commonly used asthma drug is highly effective in treating teens and adults chronically afflicted with hives and severe, itchy rash. The drug, omalizumab, was tested on 323 people at 55 medical centers for whom standard antihistamine therapy failed to quell their underlying, allergy-like reaction, known as chronic idiopathic urticaria or chronic spontaneous urticaria. "Physicians and patients may now have a fast, safe and well-tolerated treatment option to consider before prescribing ...

DETROIT – For expectant moms who may contemplate the pros and cons of natural child birth or Caesarian section, a Henry Ford Hospital study suggests that C-section babies are susceptible to developing allergies by age two. Researchers found that babies born by C-section are five times more likely to develop allergies than babies born naturally when exposed to high levels of common allergens in the home such as those from dogs, cats and dust mites. The study is being presented Sunday at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology annual meeting in San Antonio. "This ...

LA JOLLA, CA – February 24, 2013 – Small stretches of DNA in the human genome are known as "pseudogenes" because, while their sequences are nearly identical to those of various genes, they have long been thought to be non-coding "junk" DNA. But now, a new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) shows how pseudogenes can regulate the activity of a cancer-related gene called PTEN. The study also shows that pseudogenes can be targeted to control PTEN's activity. Published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, ...

Two USC scientists have developed an algorithm that could help make DNA sequencing affordable enough for clinics – and could be useful to researchers of all stripes. Andrew Smith, a computational biologist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, developed the algorithm along with USC graduate student Timothy Daley to help predict the value of sequencing more DNA, to be published in Nature Methods on February 24. Extracting information from the DNA means deciding how much to sequence: sequencing too little and you may not get the answers you are looking ...

The origin of an innate ability the brain has to protect itself from damage that occurs in stroke has been explained for the first time. The Oxford University researchers hope that harnessing this inbuilt biological mechanism, identified in rats, could help in treating stroke and preventing other neurodegenerative diseases in the future. 'We have shown for the first time that the brain has mechanisms that it can use to protect itself and keep brain cells alive,' says Professor Alastair Buchan, Head of the Medical Sciences Division and Dean of the Medical School at Oxford ...

The new study in Nature Climate Change shows that reaching the 3 energy-related objectives proposed by the United Nations in their Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative, launched in 2011, would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change and, in combination with other measures, could help keep global temperature rise from exceeding the internationally agreed target level of 2°C. "Achievement of the 3 objectives would provide an important entry point into stringent climate protection," says Joeri Rogelj, ETH Zurich researcher and IIASA-affiliated ...

Psychogenic diseases, formerly known as 'hysterical' illnesses, can have many severe symptoms such as painful cramps or paralysis but without any physical explanation. However, new research from the University of Cambridge and UCL (University College London) suggests that individuals with psychogenic disease, that is to say physical illness that stems from emotional or mental stresses, do have brains that function differently. The research was published today, 25 February, in the journal Brain. Psychogenic diseases may look very similar to illnesses caused by damage to ...

UPTON, NY – Identifying the mysterious mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) remains one of the most important and tantalizing puzzles in physics. This remarkable phenomenon allows electric current to pass with perfect efficiency through materials chilled to subzero temperatures, and it may play an essential role in revolutionizing the entire electricity chain, from generation to transmission and grid-scale storage. Pinning down one of the possible explanations for HTS—fleeting fluctuations called charge-density waves (CDWs)—could help solve the ...

Cancer is characterized by uncontrolled cell division and growth. In order to identify new therapeutic targets through which to tackle the disease, scientists seek to clarify the mechanisms that control the expression of genes that favor the development of tumors, in processes such as uncontrolled cell division. Today, Nature has published a paper by the lab headed by Raúl Méndez, ICREA professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). The study describes a mechanism controlled by the CPEB1 protein that affects more than 200 genes related to cell proliferation ...

The islands Reunion and Mauritius, both well-known tourist destinations, are hiding a micro-continent, which has now been discovered. The continent fragment known as Mauritia detached about 60 million years ago while Madagascar and India drifted apart, and had been hidden under huge masses of lava. Such micro-continents in the oceans seem to occur more frequently than previously thought, says a study in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience ("A Precambrian microcontinent in the Indian Ocean," Nature Geoscience, Vol 6, doi: 10.1038/NGEO1736). The break-up of continents ...

The team implemented the 'phase estimation algorithm' — a central quantum algorithm which achieves an exponential speedup over all classical algorithms. It lies at the heart of quantum computing and is a key sub-routine of many other important quantum algorithms, such as Shor's factoring algorithm and quantum simulations. Dr Xiao-Qi Zhou, who led the project, said: "Before our experiment, there had been several demonstrations of quantum algorithms, however, none of them implemented the quantum algorithm without knowing the answer in advance. This is because in the ...

Bottles, packaging, furniture, car parts... all made of plastic. Today we find it difficult to imagine our lives without this key material that revolutionized technology over the last century. There is wide-spread optimism in the scientific community that graphene will provide similar paradigm shifting advances in the decades to come. Mobile phones that fold, transparent and flexible solar panels, extra thin computers... the list of potential applications is endless. Scientists, industries and the European Commission are so convinced of the potential of graphene to revolutionize ...

DALLAS – Feb. 24, 2013 – The Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern has deepened the understanding of the environment within bone marrow that nurtures stem cells, this time identifying the biological setting for specialized blood-forming cells that produce the infection-fighting white blood cells known as T cells and B cells. The research found that cells called early lymphoid progenitors, which are responsible for producing T cells and B cells, thrive in an environment known as an osteoblastic niche. The investigation, published online today ...

In research that could one day improve the success of stem cell transplants and chemotherapy, scientists have found that distinct niches exist in bone marrow to nurture different types of blood stem cells. Stem cells in the blood are the precursors to infection-fighting white blood cells and oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The research, by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is reported Feb. 24 in the advance online edition of Nature. The new findings, in mice, suggest that it may be possible to therapeutically target support cells in ...

MADISON – Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a new way to accelerate a workhorse instrument that identifies proteins. The high-speed technique could help diagnose cancer sooner and point to new drugs for treating a wide range of conditions. Proteins are essential building blocks of biology, used in muscle, brain, blood and hormones. If the genes are the blueprints, the proteins patterned on them are the hammers and tongs of life. Proteins are not only numerous — humans have more than a 100,000 varieties — but each one has a complex structure ...