Life Sciences and Chemistry

Scientists have long toyed with the idea of putting to work a special class of biological catalysts, called ribozymes, as therapeutic agents. These molecular scissors would harness the activities of overly active genes that contribute to diseases like cancer by cutting their immediate products, messenger RNAs, into unusable pieces. The advantage of this approach, is that these molecules can be made to recognize very specific targets. This is reported in this month issue of EMBO reports.

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The genome sequence of Streptomyces coelicolor , one of the family of common soil bacteria that produce more than two thirds of the world’s antibiotic medicines, will be published in the journal Nature this week.

Streptomyces are almost ubiquitous in the soils and are responsible for its familiar ‘earthy’ smell. The genome data, collected by British scientists from the John Innes Centre and The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is already being used in research that will help de

A revolutionary method for detecting which human embryos are most likely to develop successfully to the stage at which they implant in the womb has been developed by scientists at the University of York and clinicians at Leeds General Infirmary.
The research has been funded by the Medical Research Council.

The discovery, if confirmed in clinical trials, could bring new hope for many couples undergoing fertility treatment since current failure rates are high. One of the problems is that e

In order to function properly, living organisms need to eliminate defective cells. This rule is however not always abided by, as evidenced by cancer cells which no longer carry out the tasks originally set for them and yet continue to proliferate, as though they were ” ignoring ” commands from their environment. Cancer can thus be defined, inter alia, as an ailment affecting signal transduction.

A team working at the Institut Curie (Inserm Unit 528) have been looking into information-con

Fossil plants form new branch in flower family tree.

Fossils recently plucked from rocks in China are the first representatives of a hitherto unknown group of flowering plants, say their discoverers Ge Sun of Jilin University and colleagues 1 .

They also add to growing evidence that flowering plants, which now dominate the land, originally emerged from the water.

The researchers call the group Archaefructaceae. Its members probably flourished in lake

A University of Ulster researcher has discovered a new population of cave dwelling crocodiles, never before seen outside their Saharan habitat.

PhD student Tara Shine discovered the cave dwelling crocodiles while living in the remote African country of Mauritania as part of a two and a half year volunteer project.

Previously unknown, except by local tribespeople, the crocodiles live in burrows and caves throughout the dry season and periods of drought – a phenomenon never