Body

In 2008, Reuben Granich and his colleagues at the World Health Organization published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet that proposed a new strategy for combating HIV in South Africa, a country staggered by the virus, with as much as 18 percent of the population estimated to be infected.

UCLA physicists have taken a significant step in controlling chemical reactions mechanically, an important advance in nanotechnology, UCLA physics professor Giovanni Zocchi and colleagues report.

Chemical reactions in the cell are catalyzed by enzymes, which are protein molecules that speed up reactions. Each protein catalyzes a specific reaction. In a chemical reaction, two molecules collide and exchange atoms; the enzyme is the third party, the "midwife to the reaction."

The sequencing and analysis of the genome for the Criollo variety of the cacao tree, generally considered to produce the world's finest chocolate, was completed by an international team led by Claire Lanaud of CIRAD, France, with Mark Guiltinan of Penn State, and included scientists from 18 other institutions.

"The large amount of information generated by this project dramatically changes the status of this tropical plant and its potential interest for the scientific community," said Guiltinan, professor of plant molecular biology, Penn State.

Berkeley — Girls in homes without a biological father are more likely to hit puberty at an earlier age, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health.

The findings, to be published Sept. 17 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that the absence of a biologically related father in the home predicted earlier breast and pubic hair development, but only for girls in higher income households. The findings held even after the girls' weight was taken into account.

The increasing commercialisation of science is restricting access to vital scientific knowledge and delaying the progress of science, claim researchers on bmj.com today.

Varuni de Silva and Raveen Hanwella from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka argue that copyrighting or patenting medical scales, tests, techniques and genetic material, limits the level of public benefit from scientific discovery.

For example, they found that many commonly used rating scales are under copyright and researchers have to pay for their use.

Processed and fast foods enriched with phosphorus additives may play a role in health disparities in chronic kidney disease, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Previously, genetics was considered the leading reason blacks are four times more likely to progress to end stage renal disease than whites and have much higher rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality in early chronic kidney disease (CKD).

A gene variation that appears to predict the rate at which Alzheimer's disease will progress has been uncovered by an international team of Alzheimer's disease experts, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, the findings help determine how rapidly Alzheimer's patients may develop full-blown dementia after their diagnosis.

A team of environmental engineers, who might better be called "archeologists of the air," have, for the first time, isolated aerosol particles in near pristine pre-industrial conditions.

Working in the remote Amazonian Basin north of Manaus, Brazil, the researchers measured particles emitted or formed within the rainforest ecosystem that are relatively free from the influence of anthropogenic, or human, activity.

Irvine, Calif., Sept. 16, 2010 — UC Irvine researchers have deciphered how lowly fruit flies bred to rapidly develop and reproduce actually evolve over time. The findings, reported in the Sept. 15 online issue of Nature, contradict the long-held belief that sexual beings evolve the same way simpler organisms do and could fundamentally alter the direction of genetic research for new pharmaceuticals and other products.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Throughout their lives, Native Hawaiians have higher risks of death than white Americans, according to a University of Michigan study.

The research is the first known study to assess mortality patterns among Native Hawaiians at the national level, including those living outside the state of Hawaii.

The study is published in the November 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, online Sept. 16. It was funded by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities, part of the National Institutes of Health.

CLEVELAND – September 16, 2010 – Menachem Shoham, PhD, associate professor and researcher in the department of biochemistry at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, has identified new anti-pathogenic drugs that, without killing the bacteria, render Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) harmless by preventing the production of toxins that cause disease.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A University of Michigan-led research team has identified a gene responsible in some families for a devastating inherited kidney disorder, thanks to a new, faster method of genetic analysis not available even two years ago. The success offers hope that scientists can speed the painstaking search for the genes responsible for many rare diseases and test drugs to treat them.

The U-M scientists report their success with exome capture, a groundbreaking genetic analysis technique, in the September issue of Nature Genetics.

A discovery made by Dr. Tarik Möröy, President and Scientific Director and Director of the Hematopoiesis and Cancer research unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM), and his team was recently published in Blood, the official journal of the American Society of Hematology. The researchers found that a protein can regulate certain characteristics of blood stem cells, which could lead to a better treatment for leukemia patients. Dr. Cyrus Khandanpour, medical doctor and postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Möröy's laboratory, is the study's first author.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study by an Oregon State University business professor has found that developing countries that adopt major international economic treaties do not necessarily gain more foreign direct investment.

In fact, in some cases adopting these treaties can hurt, not help a developing country, contrary to what agencies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) espouse. The study, published in the current online version of the Journal of World Business, has major implications for Latin American and Caribbean intellectual policy reform

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a paper appearing in the Sept. 16 online edition of Science, Matthew Vander Heiden assistant professor of biology and member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and researchers at Harvard University report a previously unknown element of cancer cells' peculiar metabolism. They found that cells can trigger an alternative biochemical pathway that speeds up their metabolism and diverts the byproducts to construct new cells.