Bees play a key role in our ecosystem and in the world's food supply. Thanks to a large collaborative effort, the genomes of two important pollinating bumblebees have been sequenced and compared with those of other bees, laying the foundations for the identification of biological factors essential for their conservation.
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A simple method of testing "twilight vision" gives reliable results in identifying people who have decreased visual acuity under low light conditions, according to a new study.
Using filters to test at a light level 100 times lower than for daylight visual acuity testing, vision care professionals can obtain "reliable and repeatable" measurements of twilight vision, report Jason S. Ng, OD, PhD, and colleagues of Southern California College of Optometry at Marshall B. Ketchum University in Fullerton, Calif.
Testing Twilight Vision--Looking for a Standard Method
Celiac disease is a life-long condition yet many people remain undiagnosed and there is concern that lengthy diagnostic delays may be putting health at risk.
While climatologists are carefully watching carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, another group of scientists is exploring a massive storehouse of carbon that has the potential to significantly affect the climate change picture.
University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography researcher Aron Stubbins is part of a team investigating how ancient carbon, locked away in Arctic permafrost for thousands of years, is now being transformed into carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere.
Duke University researchers have identified a single, simple metric to guide antibiotic dosing that could bring an entire arsenal of first-line antibiotics back into the fight against drug-resistant pathogens.
A computer simulation created by Hannah Meredith, a biomedical engineering graduate fellow at Duke, revealed that a regimen based on a pathogen's recovery time could eliminate an otherwise resistant strain of bacteria. In theory, a database of recovery times for bacterial and antibiotic combinations could allow first-line antibiotics to clear many resistant infections.
The mosquito transmitted Chikungunya virus, which causes Chikungunya fever, is spreading continuously. No vaccine is so far available. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut have experimentally recombined segments of the virus surface protein E2, thus creating artificial proteins. The domain generated that way - "sAB+" - was able to confer a protective effect against Chikungunya virus to the animal. An immunization by means of this small protein fragment could thus provide a suitable approach to developing a Chikungunya vaccine.
Human tumors grown in mouse models have long been used to test promising anti-cancer therapies. However, when a human tumor is transplanted into a mouse, the mouse immune system must be knocked down so that it doesn't attack the foreign tumor tissue, thus allowing the tumor to grow. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal Oncogene describes a new model, XactMice, in which human blood stem cells are used to grow a "humanized" mouse immune system prior to tumor transplantation.
Interventional treatments, especially surgery,provide good functional outcomes and a high cure rate for patients with lower-grade arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) of the brain, findings which contrast with a recent trial reporting better outcomes without surgery or other interventions for AVMs. "On the basis of these data, in appropriately selected patients, we recommend treatment for low-grade brain AVMs," concludes the study by Dr. Laligam N. Sekhar and colleagues of University of Washington, Seattle.
The power of invisibility has long fascinated man and inspired the works of many great authors and philosophers. In a study from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, a team of neuroscientists now reports a perceptual illusion of having an invisible body, and show that the feeling of invisibility changes our physical stress response in challenging social situations.
Analyzing the large volumes of data gathered by modern businesses and public services is problematic. Traditionally, relationships between the different parts of a network have been represented as simple links, regardless of how many ways they can actually interact, potentially loosing precious information. Only recently a more general framework has been proposed to represent social, technological and biological systems as multilayer networks, piles of 'layers' with each one representing a different type of interaction.
Rapid treatment with a new anti-inflammatory could have a major impact on recovery from spinal cord injury, University of Queensland researchers have found.
UQ School of Biomedical Sciences' Dr Marc Ruitenberg and PhD student Ms Faith Brennan said they made the discovery during laboratory trials with an experimental drug.
Ms Brennan said that excessive inflammation caused additional damage in spinal cord injuries and hindered recovery.
"We found that a molecule called C5aR exacerbates inflammation and tissue damage after spinal cord injury," she said.
More than 100 drugs have been approved to treat cancer, but predicting which ones will help a particular patient is an inexact science at best.
Generation of fragment screening libraries could enhance the analysis and application of natural products for medicinal chemistry and drug discovery, according to Griffith University's Professor Ronald Quinn.
In a paper entitled Capturing Nature's Diversity and published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, the Director of Griffith's Eskitis Institute for Drug Discovery and his co-authors propose a novel approach to capturing the structural diversity of nature for medical research and implementation.
Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells. However, it is notoriously difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines - due to contamination or simple mistakes such as mislabeling, later generations of a cell line may bear no resemblance to the original sample, potentially invalidating results of research performed on mistaken cells. For this reason, the National Cancer Institute maintains a library of 60 authenticated human cancer cell lines for the purposes of research, called the NCI-60.
A recent randomized trial that looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers. The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment.