July 17, 2012, Shenzhen, China – BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, announced today that it has successfully developed a new filtering tool, PDXomics, which performs accurate and specific classification of the mixed reads derived from the host and tumor xenografts. Through the full utilization of this robust tool, researchers could develop the specific patient-derived xenografts (PDX) and advance the oncology drug discovery, biomarker development and their future applications. Xenograft models serve as an important tool for many areas of biomedical research, ...

Finding renewable and economic sources of energy are one of the most important concerns for the continuation of the human species. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, has produced a novel strain of yeast with improved xylose tolerance and metabolism, and consequently improved ethanol production. Bioethanol is considered one of cleanest renewable replacements for fossil fuel. However using glucose from crops, such as sugar cane or starch crops, uses up resources which could otherwise be used to produce food. Xylose ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Silymarin or "milk thistle," a popular herbal dietary supplement that many people take for liver ailments, works no better than placebo in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection. That's the conclusion of a multicenter clinical trial published in the July 18, 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Patients ask me about milk thistle all the time," said Michael W. Fried, MD, lead author of the study, a professor in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and director of the UNC Liver Center. "Now I can tell ...

Several types of job carried out by future fathers may be linked to an increased risk of birth defects in their babies, suggests research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Previous research has linked certain occupations with a higher risk of birth defects in offspring. But it has tended to lump together very different types of defects and occupations, in order to achieve large sample sizes, with the attendant potential to skew the results, say the authors. They base their findings on data from the ongoing US National Birth Defects Prevention ...

Workplace exposure to organic solvents is linked to several types of heart defects at birth, indicates research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Organic solvents are widely used for dissolving or dispersing substances, such as fats, oils, and waxes, as well as in chemical manufacturing. They are found in paints, varnishes, adhesives, degreasing/cleaning agents, dyes, polymers, plastic, synthetic textiles, printing inks and agricultural products. Most organic solvents are highly volatile and enter the body through the lungs, but can also ...

Adding vitamin B12 to standard hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment significantly boosts the body's ability to keep the virus at bay, indicates a pilot study published online in the journal Gut. The effects were particularly strong in patients whose infection was proving difficult to treat effectively, the findings showed. Between 60% and 80% of those infected with the viral liver infection HCV will go on to develop chronic hepatitis, and roughly a third of them will progress to cirrhosis and terminal liver disease. Standard treatment of interferon (peg IFN) and ribavarin ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Inspired by nature, an international research team has created synthetic pores that mimic the activity of cellular ion channels, which play a vital role in human health by severely restricting the types of materials allowed to enter cells. The pores the scientists built are permeable to potassium ions and water, but not to other ions such as sodium and lithium ions. This kind of extreme selectivity, while prominent in nature, is unprecedented for a synthetic structure, said University at Buffalo chemistry professor Bing Gong, PhD, who led the study. The ...

Researchers with the UBC Hospital MS Clinic and Brain Research Centre at Vancouver Coastal Health and the University of British Columbia have published important data in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about the impact of a common drug therapy on the progression of multiple sclerosis for people with the relapsing‑remitting form of the disease. The study, led by Drs. Helen Tremlett, Afsaneh Shirani, Joel Oger and others, shows no strong evidence that a group of drugs, beta interferons (β-IFNs), prescribed to treat MS had a measurable ...

The researchers reflect on their work as well as how the U.S. system for funding research makes the United States a leader. "Because of the opportunities provided by federal research funding, we are developing a generation of scientists that has no competitor on planet Earth," says Erik Dutson, executive medical director of the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology at the University of California, Los Angeles. They also talk about the risks of decreased funding. "If you have a population of scientists that [don't] have the resources to train the ...

A study of teenage girls with eating disorders has shown that reduced essential fatty acid levels returned to normal once the girls increased their weight to a healthy level. The research, published in the August issue of Acta Paediatrica, suggests that it is not necessary to give omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplements to adolescent girls with eating disorders. "Essential fatty acid status is altered in eating disorders that result in weight loss" explains co-author Dr Ingemar Swenne from Uppsala University Children's Hospital. "This is important because ...

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a technique to cause apoptosis, or programmed cell death, that could lead to new approaches to treating cancer. Apoptosis is an essential defense mechanism against the spread of abnormal cells such as cancer. It is a complex process that occurs through networks of proteins that interact with each other. Cancer cells usually avoid this process due to mutations in the genes that encode the relevant proteins. The result is that the cancer cells survive and take over while ...

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are the first to document the characteristics of invading parasites, using malaria in New Zealand bird species. The study, published today in Ecology Letters, identifies the factors influencing the success of parasites unintentionally introduced to new environments. Avian malaria is a disease caused by species of parasites, of the genus Plasmodium, which infects birds. Just like human malaria, it is spread by mosquitoes, and the parasites spend part of their lives in red blood cells of birds. Avian malaria is common ...

Human beings have the ability to convert complex phenomena into a one-dimensional sequence of letters and put it down in writing. In this process, keywords serve to convey the content of the text. How letters and words correlate with the subject of a text is something Eduardo Altmann and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems have studied with the help of statistical methods. They discovered that what denotes keywords is not the fact that they appear very frequently in a given text. It is that they are found in greater numbers only ...

A large international study led by University of Adelaide researchers has found that women who use marijuana can more than double the risk of giving birth to a baby prematurely. Preterm or premature birth - at least three weeks before a baby's due date - can result in serious and life-threatening health problems for the baby, and an increased risk of health problems in later life, such as heart disease and diabetes. A study of more than 3000 pregnant women in Adelaide, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand has detailed the most common risk factors for preterm birth. ...

The ability of infants to recognize speech is more sophisticated than previously known, researchers in New York University's Department of Psychology have found. Their study, which appears in the journal Developmental Psychology, showed that infants, as early as nine months old, could make distinctions between speech and non-speech sounds in both humans and animals. "Our results show that infant speech perception is resilient and flexible," explained Athena Vouloumanos, an assistant professor at NYU and the study's lead author. "This means that our recognition of speech ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Black people who are married don't appear to live any longer than black couples who simply live together, suggesting marriage doesn't boost longevity for blacks the way it does for whites, according to a large national study led by Michigan State University. "This finding implies that marriage and cohabitation have very different meanings for blacks and whites," said MSU sociologist Hui Liu, the study's lead researcher. The study, in the Journal of Marriage and Family, is the first to document mortality differences between cohabiters and married ...

A follow-up study of more than 34,000 women in Sweden has shown that moderate drinkers, in comparison with abstainers, were at significantly lower risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an often serious and disabling type of arthritis. RA is known to relate to inflammation, and it is thought that this inflammation is blocked to some degree by the consumption of alcohol. In this study, women who consumed at least 4 drinks per week (with a drink being defined as containing 15 grams of alcohol) had 37% lower risk of developing RA than subjects reporting never drinking ...

A network of porous carbon tubes that is three-dimensionally interwoven at nano and micro level – this is the lightest material in the world. It weights only 0.2 milligrams per cubic centimetre, and is therefore 75 times lighter than Styrofoam, but it is very strong nevertheless. Scientists of Kiel University (KU) and Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) have named their joint creation "Aerographite". The scientific results were published as the title story in the scientific journal Advanced Materials on July, 3rd. Today (Tuesday, July 17th) it is presented to the public. The ...

Males of the Japanese tree frog have learnt not to use their calls at the same time so that the females can distinguish between them. Scientists at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have used this form of calling behaviour to create an algorithm that assigns colours to network nodes – an operation that can be applied to developing efficient wireless networks. How can network nodes be coloured with the least possible number of colours without two consecutive nodes being the same colour? A team of researchers at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have found a ...

BOSTON – A system of care focused on the detection and systematic assessment of patients with clinical instability can yield similar outcomes as rapid response teams staffed with trained intensive care specialists, a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center study has found. The analysis of 177,347 patients over a 59-month period was published online in Critical Care Medicine, the journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Rapid Response Teams have become an important part of hospital care in recent years, sending critical care-trained responders to the bedside of decompensating ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Despite criticism that local school boards are "dinosaurs" that need to be replaced, Americans support local control of their schools, Michigan State University education scholars argue in a new paper. The public believes that all three levels of government – local, state and federal – should be involved in education policy and that local officials should be in charge of day-to-day operations of the schools, said Rebecca Jacobsen, lead researcher on the project. Jacobsen, assistant professor of education, and doctoral student Andrew Saultz analyzed ...

A major argument in favor of microfinance is that the poor who live in areas without banking services will gain higher returns on investments and increase their assets when provided with credit. But a notable new study from the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty presents some of the first real evidence of microfinance impacts and indicates that the true returns of expanding access to credit are much more complex. Some of the greatest benefits to alleviating poverty, the study suggests, may be in the impact the programs have on driving up wages. The research, ...

Macho men whose partners earn more than they do have worse romantic relationships, in part because the difference in income is a strain for them, according to a new study by Patrick Coughlin and Jay Wade from Fordham University in the US. Conversely, men who are not so traditional in their masculinity do not place as much importance on the difference in income and, as a result, appear to have better quality relationships with their female partner. The work is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles. The breadwinner role for men is still the accepted norm in marriage, ...

Though 2011 saw a significant decline in major acts of violence against the Jewish population world-wide, anti-Semitic harassment and incitement, including verbal threats, insults, and abusive behavior, have escalated, according to this year's Antisemitism Worldwide General Analysis, a publication of Tel Aviv University's Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry. The yearly report is based on the Center's Moshe Kantor Database for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism. Incidences of major violence, including the use of weapons, vandalism, ...

Researchers at UCL and Harvard have found that we punish cheats only when they end up better off than us, in a study that challenges the notion that punishment is motivated by revenge. Published today in the journal Biology Letters, the research shows that victims of cheating compare their own payoffs with those of partners when making punishment decisions. "Punishment is a costly behaviour which is often aimed at individuals that cheat during social interactions," said Dr Nichola Raihani (UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment), lead author of the study. "Imagine ...