Life Sciences and Chemistry

Spitting into a cup or licking a diagnostic test strip could someday be an attractive alternative to having your blood drawn at the doctor’s office. Researchers have identified the largest number of proteins to date in human saliva, a preliminary finding that could pave the way for more diagnostic tests based on saliva samples. Such tests show promise as a faster, cheaper and potentially safer diagnostic method than blood sampling, they say.

“There is a growing interest in saliva a

Scientists have made significant progress in developing an animal model of smallpox that closely resembles human disease, which will be necessary for testing of future vaccines and potential treatments.

The study, published in this week’s online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to demonstrate that variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, can produce lethal disease in monkeys.

Smallpox, a devastating disease, was er

Rice study probes basic science related to Alzheimer’s, other diseases

Patients suffering from diseases as varied as Type II diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dozens of lesser known maladies have one thing in common: they suffer from a large build up of amyloids, tissue that’s created when millions upon millions of misfolded proteins stick together and form a mass that the body can’t get rid of on its own. Doctors don’t yet understand whether amyloids cause disease or result f

What happens to painkillers, antibiotics and other medicines after their work is done, and they end up in the wastewater stream? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using laboratory experiments to help answer this question by studying what happens to pharmaceuticals when they react with chlorine–a disinfectant commonly used in wastewater treatment.

Scientists around the world often find drugs in water samples taken from streams and other waterways, but li

The first genetic instruction manual of a diatom, from a family of microscopic ocean algae that are among the Earth’s most prolific carbon dioxide assimilators, has yielded important insights on how the creature uses nitrogen, fats, and silica to thrive.

The diatom DNA sequencing project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and conducted at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, provides insight into how the diatom species Thalassiosira pseudonana prospers in the marine en

“The results of the research we have carried out on the genome of viruses, specifically on nucleopolyhedroviruses (NPVs; Baculoviridae) will help to understand how genetic systems evolve. This discovery is of great importance when we take into account that NPVs have shown to have great insecticide potential for the control of agricultural and forestry plagues, above all for the cultivation of maize in countries such as Mexico and Honduras”. This is one of the conclusions of the PhD thesis “Funct