The unpleasant and painful sores, and infection of newborn babies caused by the genital herpes virus could soon be a thing of the past according to Dr Julian Hickling, who is presenting results from Xenova Research Ltd today, Tuesday 8 April 2003, to the Society for General Microbiology’s Spring Meeting in Edinburgh.

“The challenge is trying to achieve a good balance between safety and a vaccine that really works,” says Dr Hickling, Research Director, Biologics of pharmaceutical company Xeno

Building on their 2001 discovery of a cellular doorway used by anthrax toxin to enter cells, University of Wisconsin Medical School researchers have found a second anthrax toxin doorway, or receptor. The finding could offer new clues to preventing the toxin’s entrance into cells.

The researchers also have found that when they isolated a specific segment of the receptor in the laboratory, they could use it as a decoy to lure anthrax toxin away from the real cell receptors, preventing much o

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have devised an advanced technique that uses mass spectrometry to identify specific proteins that are over-expressed in cancer cells, blood, urine, or any substance that contains proteins.

Using this new technique, they have already identified two proteins – MIF and CyP-A — whose levels are elevated in lung cancer cells but not in normal cells, said Edward Patz, M.D., professor of radiology and pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke.

Since Charles Darwin heralded evolution more than 150 years ago, scientists have sought to better understand when and how the vast variety of plants today diverged from common ancestors.

A new University of Georgia study, just published in Nature, demonstrates key events in plant evolution. It allows scientists to infer what the gene order may have looked like in a common ancestor of higher plants. And it shows one way plants may have differentiated from their ancestors and each other.

The newly discovered disease, Sudden Oak Death (SOD), is quickly gaining a reputation, and it’s not a good one. SOD is tenacious and lethal, using as many as 26 different plants as hosts and spreading in ways scientists don’t completely understand. Now, recent research suggests that SOD is capable of using an even greater number of host plants than previously thought. While this is not necessarily good news, it does help shed light on why SOD has been so quick to spread.

“SOD is d

VTT’s new device promotes clean combustion technology with high plant efficiency

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, offers new opportunities to improve power plant efficiency with its globally unique research equipment. Most power plant types, independent of their fuel, use steam to produce energy. The first of its kind, VTT’s equipment now enables steam to be brought to its supercritical state under research conditions. In this state, the steam may reach a temperatu