AMES, Iowa – The flu virus uses a shuttle mechanism to relay protons through a channel in a process necessary for the virus to infect a host cell, according to a research project led by Mei Hong of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory. The findings are published in the Oct. 22 issue of the journal Science. Hong, an Iowa State professor of chemistry and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, said her research team used solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to determine the structure and workings of the proton channel ...

Beating the flu is already tough, but it has become even harder in recent years – the influenza A virus has mutated so that two antiviral drugs don't slow it down anymore. Reporting their findings in the journal Science, researchers from Florida State and Brigham Young move closer to understanding why not, and how future treatments can defeat the nasty bug no matter how it changes. The two drugs, amantadine and rimantadine, are no longer recommended by the CDC for use against flu. They used to work by blocking a hole in the influenza A virus called the "M2 channel," ...

(Embargoed) Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have reported the exact molecular structure and mechanisms of a major cell signaling pathway that serves a broad range of functions in humans. Up to half of drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration directly or indirectly target G protein-coupled receptors. These receptors, which are proteins that live in the outer membranes of cells, take molecular signals from outside the cell and convert them into responses within – and those responses help control behaviors as ...

Research led by Klaus Stark and Christian Hengstenberg of the University of Regensburg identified a common variant of the cardiovascular heat shock protein gene, HSPB7, which was found to increase risk for dilated cardiomyopathy by almost 50%. Their paper appears on October 28 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. Per year, about 6 in 100,000 individuals develop dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), with a higher prevalence in men. This disease is characterized by an enlarged, weakened heart, subsequently affecting the pumping capacity and often leading to chronic heart failure. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Most marathon runners know they need to consume carbohydrates before and during a race, but many don't have a good fueling strategy. Now, one dedicated marathoner -- an MD/PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology -- has taken a more rigorous approach to calculating just how much carbohydrate a runner needs to fuel him or herself through 26.2 miles, and what pace that runner can reasonably expect to sustain. The result is a new model, described in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, which allows ...

VIDEO: Peter Schultz and graduate student Brendan Hermalyn analyzed data from bits of the Moon’s surface kicked up by a NASA-engineered collision. They found unexpected complexity -- and traces of silver.... Click here for more information. PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Scientists led by Brown University are offering the first detailed explanation of the crater formed when a NASA rocket slammed into the Moon last fall and information about the composition of the ...

STANFORD, Calif. — In a study to be published online Oct. 21 in PLoS Genetics, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have implicated the lack of a protein important in hooking our skin cells together in the most common variety of skin cancer. Depletion of this protein, called Perp, could be an early indicator of skin cancer development, and could be useful for staging and establishing prognoses. These findings' significance may extend beyond skin cancer, as Perp is found in the linings of many of our internal organs, where it plays the same role it ...

Injecting a protein that helps break down triglycerides may someday help treat an inherited form of high triglycerides, according to a new study in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, an American Heart Association journal. Triglyceride is a type of fat in the blood. Elevated levels in the blood — hypertriglyceridemia — have been linked to coronary artery disease. In the study, researchers tested a new compound in mice genetically altered to be deficient in a protein called apolipoprotein (apo)A-V, which causes them to have high blood levels of triglycerides. ...

Treating metabolic syndrome and undergoing carotid angioplasty may prevent recurrent stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), according to revised American Heart Association/American Stroke Association guidelines. Last updated in 2006, the evidence-based guidelines for doctors will be published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. "Patients who've had a stroke or TIA are at highest risk for having another event," said Karen Furie, M.D., M.P.H., writing committee chair and stroke neurologist. "Since the last update, we've had results from several studies ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life. The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, shed light on how the brain wires itself during the first few years of life, ...

INFORMATION: The Global Crop Diversity Trust (www.croptrust.org) The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. The Trust is providing support for the ongoing operations of the seed vault, as well as organizing and funding the preparation and shipment of seeds from developing ...

Most flowering plants, equipped with both male and female sex organs, can fertilize themselves and procreate without the aid of a mate. But this may only present a short-term adaptive benefit, according to a team of researchers led by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists, who report that long-term evolutionary survival of a species favors flowers that welcome pollen from another plant. "We've shown that a strong, short-term advantage experienced by individuals that have sex with themselves can be offset by long-term advantages to plant species that strictly ...

Two strains of the type of mosquito responsible for the majority of malaria transmission in Africa have evolved such substantial genetic differences that they are becoming different species, according to researchers behind two new studies published today in the journal Science. Over 200 million people globally are infected with malaria, according to the World Health Organisation, and the majority of these people are in Africa. Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds. Today's international research effort, co-led by scientists from Imperial College London, looks at ...

The four guidelines include one outlining the organisation of a PGD centre and three relating to the methods used: amplification-based testing, fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH)-based testing and polar body/embryo biopsy. "The guidelines are a detailed update to the Consortium's initial PGD guidelines, published in the same journal in 2005. They have been developed as a set which, taken together, form a complete best-practice compendium," said Gary Harton, chairman of ESHRE's PGD Consortium and Head of Molecular Genetics at Reprogenetics in Livingston, New Jersey. The ...

Researchers found that the combination of computed tomography (CT), postmortem CT angiography (CTA) and biopsy can serve as a minimally invasive option for determining natural causes of death such as cardiac arrest, according to a study in the November issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). In the last decade, postmortem imaging, especially CT, has gained increasing acceptance in the forensic field. However, CT has certain limitations in the assessment of natural death. "Vascular and organ pathologic abnormalities, for example, generally ...

Pathological protein deposits linked to Alzheimer's disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy can be triggered not only by the administration of pathogenic misfolded protein fragments directly into the brain but also by peripheral administration outside the brain. This is shown in a new study done by researchers at the Hertie Institute of Clinical Brain Research (HIH, University Hospital Tübingen, University of Tübingen) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), to be published in Science on October 21, 2010. Alzheimer's disease and a brain vascular ...

A new type of sound sensor system has been developed to predict the likelihood of a landslide. Thought to be the first system of its kind in the world, it works by measuring and analysing the acoustic behaviour of soil to establish when a landslide is imminent so preventative action can be taken. Noise created by movement under the surface builds to a crescendo as the slope becomes unstable and so gauging the increased rate of generated sound enables accurate prediction of a catastrophic soil collapse. The technique has been developed by researchers at Loughborough ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge have pin-pointed the 72 molecular switches that control the three key stages in the life cycle of the malaria parasite and have discovered that over a third of these switches can be disrupted in some way. Their research which has been funded by Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council (MRC) is a significant breakthrough in the search for cheap and effective vaccines and drugs to stop the transmission of a disease which kills up to a million children a year. Until ...

Power plants that burn fossil fuels remain the main source of electricity generation across the globe. Modern power plants have scrubbers to remove sulfur compounds from their flue gases, which has helped reduce the problem of acid rain. Now, researchers in India have devised a way to convert the waste material produced by the scrubbing process into value-added products. They describe details in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. Fossil fuels contain sulfur compounds that are released as sulfur dioxide during combustion. As such, flue gas desulfurisation ...

Researchers from the University of Valencia (UV) have identified the effects of the way parents bring up their children on social structure in Spain. Their conclusions show that punishment, deprivation and strict rules impact on a family's self esteem. "The objective was to analyse which style of parental socialisation is ideal in Spain by measuring the psychosocial adjustment of children", Fernando García, co-author of the study and a researcher at the UV, tells SINC. The study, which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Infancia y Aprendizaje, was ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A study published earlier this year in the peer reviewed online journal BMC Public Health has found that residing in a neighborhood with adverse living conditions such as low air quality, loud traffic or industrial noise, or poorly maintained streets, sidewalks and yards, makes mobility problems much more likely in late middle-aged African Americans with diabetes. "We followed a large group of African Americans for 3 years and found an extremely strong correlation between diabetes and adverse neighborhood conditions. The study participants were between ...

Jena (21 October 2010) Scientists from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany) were successful in improving a fabrication process for Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) probe tips. Atomic Force Microscopy is able to scan surfaces so that even tiniest nano structures become visible. Knowledge about these structures is for instance important for the development of new materials and carrier systems for active substances. The size of the probe is highly important for the image quality as it limits the dimensions that can be visualized – the smaller the probe, the smaller ...

PITTSBURGH—An analysis of plant and petroleum-derived plastics by University of Pittsburgh researchers suggests that biopolymers are not necessarily better for the environment than their petroleum-based relatives, according to a report in Environmental Science & Technology. The Pitt team found that while biopolymers are the more eco-friendly material, traditional plastics can be less environmentally taxing to produce. Biopolymers trumped the other plastics for biodegradability, low toxicity, and use of renewable resources. Nonetheless, the farming and chemical processing ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Being the right size and existing in the limbo between a solid and a liquid state appear to be the secrets to improving the efficiency of chemical catalysts that can create better nanoparticles or more efficient energy sources. When matter is in this transitional state, a catalyst can achieve its utmost potential with the right combination of catalyst particle size and temperature, according to a pair of Duke University researchers. A catalyst is an agent or chemical that facilitates a chemical reaction. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of chemical ...

PITTSBURGH—Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have devised an innovative and elegantly concise algorithm that can efficiently solve systems of linear equations that are critical to such important computer applications as image processing, logistics and scheduling problems, and recommendation systems. The theoretical breakthrough by Professor Gary Miller, Systems Scientist Ioannis Koutis and Ph.D. student Richard Peng, all of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department, has enormous practical potential. Linear systems are widely used to model real-world ...