Life Sciences and Chemistry

Transplantation of human brain cells corrected involuntary muscle spasms in rats with ischemic spinal cord injury, according to research published online October 12 and in print October 19, 2004 in the European Journal of Neurosciences by investigators at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine.

Ischemic spinal cord injury, caused by reduced blood flow to the spinal cord, occurs in 20 to 40 percent of the several hundred patients each year in the U.S. wh

For the first time, researchers have sequenced all 36 genes of novel receptors that appear to play a critical role in the innate immune protection of zebrafish – an achievement that could lead to a better understanding of infectious diseases and certain cancers.

Their paper, titled “Resolution of the novel immune-type receptor gene cluster in zebrafish,” appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is the most genetically complex system

Working with an enzyme that degrades anti-cancer drugs in humans, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill biochemists and colleagues have made a discovery that they believe eventually could help improve such drugs’ design and effectiveness.

The scientists have shown that the enzyme protein can be made to “fly through the vapor phase” — from which solvent water is totally absent — without changing its structure.

When a solution containing the enzyme was introduced

Get a group of scientists together and mention the word “chlorine” and watch the sparks start to fly. That’s exactly what happened at a forum on a different, but related, topic of sustainability, sponsored by the news magazine Chemical & Engineering News, a publication of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

As a result of a “vigorous and provocative debate” about chlorine at that forum, the magazine’s editors asked two leadin

It’s a good thing that the now eight-year-old son of Miklos Gratzl, a Case Western Reserve University biomedical engineer, got a splinter in his finger one day – at least for the sake of science. With apologies to his son – instead of an “Ouch!” moment, for Gratzl it was more of an “A-ha!” moment.

As he was removing it from his son’s finger, the splinter gave him an idea: Since it showed no open wound in the skin, he thought to himself that a sensor like a sliver would be ideal

Alpine cranberries have significant biological activity that can help to combat herpes virus type II (HSV-2) infection, one of the most common viral infections in humans, writes Emma Dorey in Chemistry & Industry.

Researchers at the Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan isolated a compound called proanthocyanidin A-1 from the evergreen shrub, also known as Vaccinium vitis-idaea, lingonberry or partridgeberry. Chun-Ching Lin and his team found that the compound significantly suppre