Life Sciences and Chemistry

Males pirate and fertilize egg clutches

One of Europe’s most common backyard frogs has been keeping a secret that, despite centuries of study and thousands of published papers, has only now been discovered in ponds in the Pyrenees. The European common frog, Rana temporaria, has long been thought to have a straightforward breeding strategy — one lucky male grabs the female and fertilizes her eggs as soon as she releases them into the water. End of story.

But that&#

Malaria affects around 600 million people in the world and leads to an annual death toll of over 2 million. It is the world’s most widespread parasitic disease. It is caused by Plasmodium falciparum, a pathogen transmitted to humans by a mosquito. In Africa, where malaria is endemic, mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus are the only vectors of the disease. The many studies which have been devoted to them have led to the characterization of different species and the identification, among these, of vect

Little is known about the causes of lymphoma. A case-control study conducted by Professor Nikolaus Becker and Dr. Alexandra Nieters, Division of Clinical Epidemiology at the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ), is looking closely at possible risk factors. First results of this German lymphoma study suggest immunological factors associated with lifestyle and environment. Too few challenges for the immune system during early childhood may possibly promote not onl

Tail of Ubc12 binds this protein to a larger molecule during a cascade of biochemical reactions that assembles an “on switch” that accelerates cell replication

A unique tail at one end of a protein called Ubc12 stabilizes a molecular workshop that assembles the “on-switch cells” used to accelerate cell replication. This finding, by investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, is published online by the journal Nature Structual and Molecular Biology (NSMB).

The di

A Finnish research group has been the first in the world to publish an article in which BNCT treatment has had an excellent response in a patient with head and neck cancer for whom there was no other treatment available. The case report has been published in the June issue of the prestigious Radiotherapy and Oncology no. 72 (2004) pp. 83 – 84.

BNCT treatment, which was developed for treating difficult brain tumours, has since last year also been given to patients with recurrent hea

May serve as new target for antiviral drugs

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have produced the first molecular-scale images of DNA binding to an adenovirus enzyme — a step they believe is essential for the virus to cause infection. The images, which appear on the cover of the October 2004 issue of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, show how binding to DNA may stimulate the enzyme and are alre