Researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Biochemistry have developed methods for making RNA duplexes and single-stranded RNAs of desired length and sequence. This exciting technology is most applicable to commercial RNA providers and companies with large in-house requirements for RNA molecules as it will greatly increase cost-effectiveness.

Small interfering ribonucleic acids (siRNAs) are powerful laboratory tools for directed post- transcriptional gene expression knockdown and inhi

The Ntumu (the Beti-Fang), live in the equatorial forest in southern Cameroon, in the north of Gabon and of Equatorial Guinea. They practice a semi-nomadic slash-and-burn form of agriculture. Their farming is highly diversified, mainly of food crops (such as cassava, plantain banana, sweet potato, yam and taro) but they also produce cash crops (cacao, groundnuts). When they clear a plot (1 ha on average), the Ntumu systematically spare certain trees, generally about 15 whatever cutting methods or imp

Areas deforested in Brazil increased from 152 000 km_ in 1976 to 517 000 km_ in 1996. That figure is the equivalent of the surface area of France. Deforestation is a complex process and involves a host of changing and widely differing situations. The factors behind it are many and varied. They include rising demand for agricultural land, international trade needs for timber and political decisions regarding strategic planning and development.

Researchers of the IRD Space Unit conducted an i

Three new studies by researchers at UC Davis Cancer Center provide new pieces to the puzzle of why some prostate cancers become resistant to androgen suppression therapy. The studies were presented Sunday afternoon at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Urological Association.

Of the nearly 190,000 men in the United States who develop prostate cancer every year, a substantial proportion will require androgen suppression therapy to reduce levels of male hormones — a treatment that can sh

Scientists have finally laid hands on the first member of a recalcitrant group of proteins called the Wnts two decades after their discovery. Important regulators of animal development, these proteins were suspected to have a role in keeping stem cells in their youthful, undifferentiated state – a suspicion that has proven correct, according to research carried out in two laboratories at Stanford University Medical Center. The ability to isolate Wnt proteins could help researchers grow some types of

A team of researchers headed by Douglas R. Cavener, professor and head of the Department of Biology at Penn State University, has announced important findings about the causes of three human diseases: severe, juvenile-onset diabetes; osteoporosis; and Wolcott-Rallison Syndrome, a rare condition whose sufferers exhibit a combination of diabetes, retarded growth, and skeletal abnormalities. Their work suggests promising lines of research for the therapeutic treatment of these diseases. The work will be