Life Sciences and Chemistry

From salting and drying to pickling and irradiating, humans have devised many ingenious ways of preserving their food from spoilage by microbes. The question of what microbes gain from making food go off in the first place has attracted less attention, but research presented at this years British Ecological Society Annual Meeting will shed new light on the problem.

Speaking at the meeting, taking place at Lancaster University on 7-9 September 2004, Dr Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John

An unprecedented picture of how bacteria latch on to human cells has been published by UK, French and US scientists. They have produced a finely detailed model of one of the tools used by some of the nastiest varieties of the stomach bug, Escherichia coli, to stick to and gain entry to host cells.

Led by senior author Dr Stephen Matthews, Reader in Chemical and Structural Biology at Imperial College London, the research is published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Cell

Biochemists have pinpointed how a flaw in DNA that is central to mutations in cancer and aging fools the cellular enzyme that copies DNA. Their finding explains how oxidative DNA damage — a process long believed to underlie cancers and aging — can create permanent genetic damage.

The Duke University Medical Center researchers’ findings were published online Aug. 22, 2004, by the journal Nature. The scientists were led by Associate Professor of Biochemistry Lorena Beese, Ph.D., and

White blood cells are the principle mediators of immune system function, yet efforts to influence their role in illness have been hampered due to a lack of understanding of the surface structure of these cells – until now. Dartmouth Medical School researchers characterize the structure of white blood cells and challenge assumptions about how a certain immunodeficiency disorder affects the white blood cell surface in the September 1 issue of Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematolog

Scientists have capitalized on genomic data to define novel diagnostic tests and to gain insight into the evolutionary and genetic history of the deadly pathogen Bacillus anthracis (anthrax).

Researchers at Northern Arizona University (NAU), the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) used nearly 1000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to define the genetic and evolutionary types of several anthrax isolates with extremely h

Research runs counter to Darwin’s theory of natural selection

A team of biochemists from UC Riverside published a paper in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology that gives one explanation for why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually.
It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it mea