Life Sciences and Chemistry

Anyone who’s endured their share of childhood scrapes has probably heard some version of the motherly admonishment, “Don’t pick that scab, you’ll just make it worse!” It turns out, Mom was on to something, according to research published on-line in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.

Tissue damage in humans triggers a well-characterized response marked by rapid blood clotting and a recruitment of epidermal cells to the injury. When you remove a scab, you’re also removing some of the new

Vertebrates come in a dazzling array of shapes and sizes, from blue whales to pygmy bats, their overt morphology determined largely by the skeleton. The head skeleton in particular has undergone remarkable diversification, as is beautifully illustrated in Darwin’s examination of beak morphology in Galapagos finches. This week in PLoS Biology, Justin Crump, Mary Swartz, and Charles Kimmel explore the mechanism by which cell signals induce specific patterns of cartilage and bone that form the vertebr

Published this week on-line in PLoS Biology, Sara Sawyer, Michael Emerman, and Harmit Malik investigate the genetic roots of the battle for evolutionary advantage between HIV-type viruses and the hosts they infect. What they find is surprising.

The gene, APOBEC3G, belongs to a family of primate genes that produce enzymes (in this case, APOBEC3G) that “edit” DNA and RNA, by slipping into viral particles and inducing mutations that replace one base (cytosine) with another (uracil) as the viru

That cardinal singing his heart out in your backyard has ancestors that left the neighborhood of Australia 45 million years ago. A comprehensive study of DNA from songbirds and their relatives shows that these birds, which account for almost half of all bird species, did not originate in Eurasia, as previously thought. Instead, their ancestors escaped from a relatively small area–Australasia (Australia, New Zealand and nearby islands) and New Guinea–about 45 million years ago and went on to popula

Results of laboratory experiments by Johns Hopkins scientists suggest it may be possible to “educate” the immune system to recognize rather than destroy human embryonic stem cells. Doing so could reduce the risk of rejection if the primitive cells are someday transplanted into people with conditions like Parkinson’s disease, diabetes or spinal cord injuries, the researchers say.

In their experiments, described in the July 10 issue of The Lancet, the Hopkins team successfully coaxed human

When a physician discovers cancer in a patient, the first thing the doctor wants to know is whether that cancer has spread, or “metastasized.” This metastasis signifies that the patient has entered a new and potentially lethal phase of the disease. A new study opens up the possibility of detecting whether a tumor will spread long before a patient ever reaches that dangerous phase.

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute in Seattle have found evidence for a DNA structure char