Trypanosomes are parasites responsible for many human and animal diseases, primarily in tropical climates. One disease these parasites cause, African sleeping sickness, results from the bite of infected tsetse flies, putting over 60 million Africans at risk in 36 sub-Saharan countries. The recent 1998-2001 sleeping sickness epidemics in South Sudan, [...]
Scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), a biomedical research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and their colleagues from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School and Princeton University have recently discovered that viruses that ‘invaded’ the human genome [...]
Microbes could soon be used to convert metallic wastes into high-value catalysts for generating clean energy, say scientists writing in the September issue of Microbiology.
Researchers from the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham have discovered the mechanisms that allow the common soil bacterium Desulfovibrio desulfuricans to recover the precious [...]
The West African forest gecko, a secretive but widely distributed species in forest patches from Ghana to Congo, is actually four distinct species that appear to have evolved over the past 100,000 years due to the fragmentation of a belt of tropical rain forest , according to a report in the [...]
Don’t pour that dirty fat from the fryer down the sink — it could be used to make the fuel of the future.
Hydrogen has been tipped as a cleaner, greener alternative to fossil fuels. But scientists have struggled to find a way to make it that doesn’t consume vast amounts of energy, use [...]
If mice are administered an antibiotic for three days and are simultaneously infected with malaria, no parasites appear in the blood and life-threatening disease is averted. In addition, the animals treated in this manner also develop robust, long-term immunity against subsequent infections.
This discovery was made by the team headed by Dr. [...]
The immune system may open the door to recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) by overdoing its response to an initial infection, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.
Researchers showed in mice that severe inflammatory responses to an initial UTI cause bladder damage and allow infection to [...]
Within a dangerous stomach bacterium, Yale University researchers have discovered an ancient but functioning genetic remnant from a time before DNA existed, they report in the August 13 issue of the journal Science.
To the surprise of researchers, this RNA complex seems to play a critical role in the ability of the organism [...]
Duke University physicists have developed a way to produce sharp fluid jets with enough precision that they can inject material into a single, living cell. The technique promises a way to deliver drugs to cells one at a time, which is likely to be very valuable for research involving stem cells [...]
DNA microarrays are one of the most powerful tools in molecular biology today. The devices, which can be used to probe biological samples and detect particular genes or genetic sequences, are employed in everything from forensic analysis to disease detection to drug development.
Now Paul Li and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in [...]
