Press monitoring
Genome-editing tool streamlined to thwart deadliest animal
18.3.2015 | Press monitoring
Life science researchers at Virginia Tech have accelerated a game-changing technology that's being used to study one of the planet's most lethal disease-carrying animals. Writing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers revealed an improved way to study genes in mosquitoes using a genome-editing method known...
Editing human embryos is genetics\' new battleground
16.3.2015 | Press monitoring
Replacing faulty genes in early human embryos and germ cells is within our grasp. Such changes affect DNA in the nucleus and so would be heritable; ultimately, they could be used to make a genetically modified baby. There are already reports that groups in China, the US and the biotech industry have done this kind of genetic engineering in the...
Secret of how plants regulate their vitamin C production revealed
13.3.2015 | Press monitoring
A QUT scientist has helped unravel the way in which plants regulate their levels of vitamin C, the vitamin essential for preventing iron deficiency anemia and conditions such as scurvy. Professor Roger Hellens, working with Dr William Laing from New Zealand's Plant and Food Research, has discovered the mechanism plants use to regulate the levels...
Researchers put mouse gene in cattle to make them less susceptible to TB
11.3.2015 | Press monitoring
A team of researchers working at Northwest A&F University in China has found that introducing a particular mouse gene into cattle can give them better protection against tuberculosis. TB infections in cattle costs growers in many countries millions of dollars every year, the current strategy for combating the disease is to separate those that are...
Bioengineers put human hearts on a chip to aid drug screening
9.3.2015 | Press monitoring
When University of California, Berkeley, bioengineers say they are holding their hearts in the palms of their hands, they are not talking about emotional vulnerability. Instead, the research team led by bioengineering professor Kevin Healy is presenting a network of pulsating cardiac muscle cells housed in an inch-long silicone device that...
Protecting crops from radiation-contaminated soil
6.3.2015 | Press monitoring
Almost four years after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, farmland remains contaminated with higher-than-natural levels of radiocesium in some regions of Japan, with cesium-134 and cesium-137 being the most troublesome because of the slow rate at which they decay. In a study published in Scientific Reports, a...
Plant protein structure database will help to uncover unknown functions of plant genes
4.3.2015 | Press monitoring
Rigorous analysis of the structures of thousands of plant proteins by Tetsuya Sakurai and colleagues from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science has led to the construction of a database that will help scientists identify the functions of more plant genes. Although the complete genomes have been sequenced for a number of plants and...
Gene may help reduce GM contamination
2.3.2015 | Press monitoring
Genetically modified crops have long drawn fire from opponents worried about potential contamination of conventional crops and other plants. Now a plant gene discovered by University of Guelph scientists might help farmers reduce the risk of GM contamination and quell arguments against the use of transgenic food crops, says Sherif Sherif, lead...
Fighting the Colorado potato beetle with RNA interference
27.2.2015 | Press monitoring
Colorado potato beetles are a dreaded pest of potatoes all over the world. Since they do not have natural enemies in most potato producing regions, farmers try to control them with pesticides. However, this strategy is often ineffective because the pest has developed resistances against nearly all insecticides. Now, scientists from the Max...
Tissue engineering: Scientists grow leg muscle from cells in a dish
25.2.2015 | Press monitoring
A team of researchers from Italy, Israel and the United Kingdom has succeeded in generating mature, functional skeletal muscles in mice using a new approach for tissue engineering. The scientists grew a leg muscle starting from engineered cells cultured in a dish to produce a graft. The subsequent graft was implanted close to a normal,...
