Life Sciences and Chemistry

An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis with his doctoral student has patented a device for trapping and deactivating microbial particles. The work is promising in the war on terrorism for deactivating airborne bioagents and bioweapons such as the smallpox virus, anthrax and ricin, and also in routine indoor air ventilation applications such as in buildings and aircraft cabins.

Pratim Biswas, Ph.D.,Stifel & Quinette Jens Professor of Environmental Engineering Scienc

Scientists zero in on five chromosome regions

Scientists at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center, working with colleagues in the U-M School of Public Health, have significantly narrowed the range of chromosomal locations where they expect to find genes associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

In a paper published in the March issue of American Journal of Human Genetics, Kellogg scientist Anand Swaroop, Ph.D., and his team of researchers have confirmed

The catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs and other animal species, 65 million years ago also brought dramatic changes to the vegetation. In a study presented in latest issue of the journal Science, the paleontologists Vivi Vajda from the University of Lund, Sweden and Stephen McLoughlin from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia have described what happened to the vegetation month by month. They depict a world in darkness where the fungi had taken over.

It´s known that an

One hallmark of most cancer cells is that they have the incorrect number of chromosomes, a state called aneuploidy. Now, researchers at the University of Virginia Health System, writing in a recent issue of the journal Current Biology, think they know how cells protect themselves from aneuploidy when they divide in a process known as mitosis. “During mitosis, the cell divides replicated chromosomes to two daughter cells. We are studying a mitotic system that ensures that each cell receives the right

Lengthy sequences of DNA — with their component triplet of nucleotides repeated hundreds, even thousands of times — are known to be abnormal, causing rare but devastating neurological diseases. But how does the DNA get this way? How does it go haywire, multiplying out of control?

In the current issue of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Sergei Mirkin, professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, explains the mechanism, providi

Two new studies, one to be published on 5 March 2004 in the journal Cell and the other published on 27 February 2004 in Molecular Cell, reveal a surprising relationship among the hordes of gene regulatory molecules that are the ultimate controllers of life processes. The surprise is that only a small portion of all genes–those needed to respond to emergencies–within a simple organism such as baker’s yeast are heavily regulated. Most other genes, in contrast, typically control more routine hous