Body

CINCINNATI—A University of Cincinnati (UC) analysis of 10 years of data from local kidney transplant patients shows that patients removed from a corticosteroid regimen shortly after surgery have better graft survival rates, better survival rates and fewer cardiovascular events than patients kept on the traditional regimen of long-term steroids.

How should a country respond to a biological invader that reaches its shores via cargo shipped as international trade?

Pesky invaders like Zebra mussels, Asian Longhorned Beetles, Kudzu, Triffid weed and others have wreaked billions of dollars in economic damage, destroying agriculture, harming human health and threatening biodiversity.

AMARILLO – A microscopic look into the genes of a Colorado wheat variety has allowed Texas AgriLife Research scientists to identify a wheat streak mosaic virus-resistance gene.

Wheat streak mosaic virus is one of the most common wheat viruses found in the 75 million acres of wheat across the U.S. – 3.3 million acres in Texas, said Dr. Charlie Rush, AgriLife Research plant pathologist in Amarillo.

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting on the discovery of a bug with bifocals – such an amazing finding that it initially had the researchers questioning whether they could believe their own eyes. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of truly bifocal lenses in the extant animal kingdom," the researchers state in the Aug. 24 cover feature of the premier life-science journal, Current Biology.

In prehistoric times farmers across the world domesticated wild plants to create an agricultural revolution. As a result the ancestral plants have been lost, causing problems for anyone studying the domestication process of modern-day varieties, but that might change. A team led by Fabiola Parra at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has managed to trace a domesticated cactus, the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe (Stenocereus pruinosus) to its living ancestor that can still be found in the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico.

BOSTON, Aug. 23, 2010 — An unlikely effort is underway to lift the veil of nearly-total secrecy that has surrounded the process of developing new prescription drugs for the last century, scientists said today at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The upheaval in traditional practice would make key data available to college students, university professors, and others in an open, collective process.

A combination of Chinese herbs in use for more than 1,800 years reduced the gastrointestinal side effects of chemotherapy in mice, while actually enhancing the effects of the cancer treatment, Yale University researchers report.

A new analysis has found that while colon cancer rates have remained steady over the past several decades among people under the age of 40, rectal cancer rates are increasing in this population across races and in both sexes. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that greater efforts are needed to diagnose rectal cancer in young individuals who show potential signs of the disease.

In a study of egg cells using time-lapse microscopy, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research have discovered an unusual property of meiosis – cell division that produces reproductive cells in sexually reproducing organisms. The discovery of an "inside out" mechanism by which egg cell chromosomes separate from each other may shed light on mistakes made in chromosome distribution that can lead to Down syndrome, high miscarriage rates in humans, and the age-related decrease in fertility in human females.

A key step in understanding the origins of familial breast cancer hasbeen made by two teams of scientists at the University of California,Davis. The researchers have purified, for the first time, the proteinproduced by the breast cancer susceptibility gene BRCA2 and used itto study the oncogene's role in DNA repair.

The results will be published online Aug. 22 in the journals Nature,and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. They open newpossibilities for understanding, diagnosing and perhaps treatingbreast cancer.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center have identified two drugs that, when combined, may serve as an effective treatment for HIV.

The two drugs, decitabine and gemcitabine – both FDA approved and currently used in pre-cancer and cancer therapy – were found to eliminate HIV infection in the mouse model by causing the virus to mutate itself to death – an outcome researchers dubbed "lethal mutagenesis."

The virus that causes AIDS may undergo changes in the genital tract rendering HIV-1 in semen different than HIV-1 in the blood, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research (United Kingdom), and the Baylor Pediatric Center of Excellence (Malawi). The research, published August 19 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, advances understanding of HIV-1 replication in the male genital tract.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Thanks to a single-molecule imaging technique developed by a University of Illinois professor, researchers have revealed the mechanisms of an important DNA-regulating enzyme.