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New research provides evidence for significant differences between new and old red blood cells used for transfusions and could provide a cheap, rapid and effective way to monitor the quality of blood supplies.

This week the scientific journal Ecology Letters has published a synthesis of the ecological impacts of invasive plants worldwide. This global analysis has been based on more than one thousand studies that in total describe the impacts of 135 invasive plant species. The lead author, Dr. Montserrat Vilà, a professor at the Spanish Higher Research Council (CSIC) adds: "This assessment would have been impossible to achieve ten years ago, because the evidence was anecdotal, it has only been in the last decade that well designed field studies have been conducted".

A recent study of significant research value carried out at the State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China-Research, and published in the May 2011 issue of Science China Life Sciences (Issue 54) described a novel method using FoldX force field based protein modeling that can be applied in zinc finger nucleases design.

The way that clinicians report outcomes of surgery for a traumatic nerve injury involving the arm is not standardized, and it is thus difficult to compare the efficacy of different surgical treatments, according to a study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York. In a second HSS study, investigators say they have developed a tool to measure outcomes that they hope can be refined and used worldwide. Both studies will be presented at the International Symposium on Brachial Plexus Surgery, which will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, May 19-21.

Cancer treatments often have the side effect of impairing the patient's immune system. This can result in life-threatening secondary infections from bacteria and fungi, especially since bacteria, like Staphylococcus aureus, are becoming multi-drug resistant (MRSA). New research published by BioMed Central's open access journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials investigates the potency of Indian wild plants against bacterial and fungal infections in the mouths of oral cancer patients.

Bitter cumin is used extensively in traditional medicine to treat a range of diseases from vitiligo to hyperglycemia. It is considered to be antiparasitic and antimicrobial and science has backed up claims of its use to reduce fever or as a painkiller. New research published in BioMedCentral's open access journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine shows that this humble spice also contains high levels of antioxidants.

A human genetic variant associated with an almost 30 percent reduced risk of developing severe malaria has been identified. Scientists from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM), Hamburg, and Kumasi University, Ghana, reveal that a variant at the FAS locus can prevent an excessive and potentially hazardous immune response in infected children. The study appears in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics on May 19.

Wolbachia are bacteria that infect many insects, including mosquitoes. However, Wolbachia do not naturally infect Anopheles mosquitoes, which are the type that spreads malaria to humans. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that artificial infection with different Wolbachia strains can significantly reduce levels of the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, in the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae.

Bremerhaven, 19 May 2011. The research vessel Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association will arrive back at its homeport of Bremerhaven after a seven-month expedition on Friday, 20 May. Nearly 200 researchers from institutes in 15 countries took part in the expedition. The oceanographers on board conducted measurements showing that warming of the water in the deep Weddell Sea continues further. The observations of biologists indicated that organisms in the Antarctic adapt very slowly to changes in the environment.

Colorectal cancer patients with defects in mismatch repair--one of the body's systems for repairing DNA damage--have lower recurrence rates and better survival rates than patients without such defects, according to a study published online May 19th in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

New York, NY, May 19, 2011 – The Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) legislation required a core set of recommended health care quality measures to be identified for voluntary use by State Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP), which together cover almost 40 million American children and adolescents.

It sounds like hype from a late-night infomercial: It can twist and bend without breaking! And wait, there's more: It could someday help you fend off disease!

But in this case it's true, thanks to scientists from several institutions including the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They derived atomic-scale resolution structures of the cell's protein-making machine, the ribosome, at key stages of its job.

PHILADELPHIA – Discovering the step-by-step details of the path embryonic cells take to develop into their final tissue type is the clinical goal of many stem cell biologists.To that end, Kenneth S. Zaret, PhD, professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and associate director of the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Cheng-Ran Xu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Zaret laboratory, looked at immature cells called progenitors and found a way to potentially predict their fate.

SEATTLE – Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have discovered a new drug target for squamous cell carcinoma – the second most common form of skin cancer. Scientists in the laboratory of Valeri Vasioukhin, Ph.D., have found that a protein called alpha-catenin acts as a tumor suppressor and they also have unlocked the mechanism by which this protein controls cell proliferation.

The findings by Vasioukhin and colleagues will be published May 24 in Science Signaling.

Scientists at Penn State University have achieved a major milestone in the attempt to assemble, in a test tube, entire chromosomes from their component parts. The achievement reveals the process a cell uses to package the basic building blocks of an organism's entire genetic code -- its genome. The evidence provided by early research with the new procedure overturns three previous theories of the genome-packaging process and opens the door to a new era of genome-wide biochemistry research.