Lung injury due to infection, such as in sepsis, accounts for hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations a year. Sepsis occurs in 2 percent of hospital admissions and is associated with a death rate of about 50 percent. Many of these patients require ventilation to support their breathing, which may in itself produce additional injury to the lung. Yet, there are few available treatments for lung injury associated with sepsis or ventilation.

Now, scientists at Northwestern University have demo

ONR-sponsored Bonnie Bassler looks at bacterial communication

She thinks they’re everywhere. What’s more, she thinks they talk to each other.
But don’t snicker…ONR-sponsored Bonnie Bassler won a MacArthur Foundation ’genius award’ last year for her research on how some of the most deadly microbes we know – cholera, plague, TB, just to mention a few – communicate surprisingly well.

In her Princeton Lab, Bassler (and the rest of the microbiology community) calls it ’quor

Two papers in the May 1 issue of Genes & Development reveal unexpectedly widespread genomic binding by the Myc protein – prompting scientists to consider that this highly studied human oncogene may still have a few secrets to reveal.

Independent research groups led by Drs. Robert Eisenman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center) and Bruno Amati (European Institute of Oncology) report on the first genome-wide analyses of in vivo Myc targets in the Drosophila and human genomes, respectively. As the my

As a fiber, spider silk is so desirable that scientists have spent decades trying to find a way to mimic it. A team at MIT has been tackling the problem from two directions.

“The main goal is to be able to reproduce the enormous energy absorption and strength-bearing properties of spider silk,” said Paula T. Hammond, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering. “[We want] to be able to obtain a material in large quantities and cheaply … without DNA techniques, which a

Monoamniotic twins: An 8-year experience

With intensive and constant in-hospital fetal monitoring of monoamniotic (MA) twins, delivery can be delayed to beyond 34 weeks, and the live discharge rate can approach that of other twin pregnancies. This is significant because, historically, twins who shared a common amniotic sac had only about a 50 percent chance of both twins surviving. Those who did survive were typically delivered prematurely, resulting in a higher risk of severe health

By blocking a protein key to prostate cancer cell growth, researchers at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University have discovered a way to trigger extensive prostate cancer cell death. This finding opens a new window for developing targeted treatments aimed at destroying prostate cancer cells before they have the opportunity to grow or spread. The study is published in the April 29 online issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

“By preventing the Stat5 protein from being a