Scientists announce in the current issue of the journal Nature their discovery that plants respond to environmental stresses with a sequence of molecular signals known in humans and other mammals as the “G-protein signaling pathway,” revealing that this signaling strategy has long been conserved throughout evolution. Because a large percentage of all the drugs approved for use in humans target the G-protein signaling pathway, the team’s findings could also be used in the search for plant compounds t

In plants, many proteins are degraded or activated within the vacuole, a large water and nutrient-filled vesicle found in plant cells that helps maintain the shape of plant cells and that stores food molecules. The manner by which this degradation or activation occurs, however, is uncertain.

In the June 10, 2003, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), however, scientists from UC Riverside identify a key protein, vacuolar processing enzyme or VPEg, in Arabidops

The first overview analysis of a year’s worth of high-resolution infrared data gathered by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft is opening Mars to a new kind of detailed geological analysis and revealing a dynamic planet that has experienced dramatic environmental change.

The report by THEMIS’s science team will appear in an upcoming issue of Science and will be released on June 5 in the magazine’s online preview, Science Express.

“THEMIS

Europe’s first mission to the Red Planet, continues its successful mission with another successful ’’high-risk’’ post-launch milestone. Mars Express engineers breathed a sigh of relief this morning at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), in Germany.

If a particularly delicate operation had not proceeded as planned, it would have been impossible to deploy the Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, on arrival at Mars.
This crucial operation consisted of releasing

In recent years, the solution to the problem of diseased or damaged organs has been to replace the old with the new. By taking tissue from either a patient or a donor, surgeons have transplanted this to the damaged area and given many people a new lease of life.

The method is not without limitations, however. Issues such as the availability of donor organs and the need to use drugs to prevent the immune system rejecting the “foreign” tissue have prompted research into alternative ways to d

A new way to make gold form inside the cells of a micro-organism is published today in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology. Researchers from the National Chemical Laboratory and the Armed Forces Medical College, both in Pune, India, have been using “green chemistry” to develop an eco-friendly way to make tiny gold particles without using toxic chemicals.

Such gold nanoparticles of uniform size can be used in labelling proteins, nucleic acids and other biomolecules, which could l