Press monitoring
Aluminum tolerance fix could open arable land
1.5.2014 | Press monitoring
With as much as 40 percent of the world's potentially arable land unusable due to aluminum toxicity, a solution may be near: Cornell agricultural scientists report that a gene – and the protein it expresses – play a major role in allowing rice to tolerate the toxic metal in acid soils. Of all the cereal crops, rice is the most aluminum tolerant....
Label-free, sequence-specific, inexpensive fluorescent DNA sensors
30.4.2014 | Press monitoring
Using principles of energy transfer more commonly applied to designing solar cells, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new highly sensitive way to detect specific sequences of DNA. As described in a paper published in the journal Chemistry of Materials, the method is considerably less...
Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method
29.4.2014 | Press monitoring
The dream of generating a bank of stem cells to treat injury and illness is a step closer. Embryonic stem cells have been custom-made from adult cells without manipulating the cell's genes, a process that could trigger cancer. Using a similar cloning technique to the one that created Dolly the sheep, two teams have independently shown that it is...
Ocean microbes display remarkable genetic diversity
28.4.2014 | Press monitoring
The smallest, most abundant marine microbe, Prochlorococcus, is a photosynthetic bacteria species essential to the marine ecosystem. An estimated billion billion billion of the single-cell creatures live in the oceans, forming the base of the marine food chain and occupying a range of ecological niches based on temperature, light and chemical...
Genetic code of the deadly tsetse fly unraveled
25.4.2014 | Press monitoring
Mining the genome of the disease-transmitting tsetse fly, researchers have revealed the genetic adaptions that allow it to have such unique biology and transmit disease to both humans and animals. The tsetse fly spreads the parasitic diseases human African trypanosomiasis, known as sleeping sickness, and Nagana that infect humans and animals...
3D Tumors Are Printed in the Lab
24.4.2014 | Press monitoring
Using 3D printing, researchers have made a tumor-like lump of cancer cells in the lab, and they say this lump shows a greater resemblance to natural cancer than do the two-dimensional cultured cells grown in a lab dish. This more realistic representation of a tumor could aid studies on cancer and drug treatments, the researchers said. To build...
Cow manure harbors diverse new antibiotic resistance genes
23.4.2014 | Press monitoring
Manure from dairy cows, which is commonly used as a farm soil fertilizer, contains a surprising number of newly identified antibiotic resistance genes from the cows' gut bacteria. The findings, reported in mBio the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, hints that cow manure is a potential source of new types of...
Cloaked DNA nanodevices survive pilot mission
22.4.2014 | Press monitoring
It's a familiar trope in science fiction: In enemy territory, activate your cloaking device. And real-world viruses use similar tactics to make themselves invisible to the immune system. Now scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have mimicked these viral tactics to build the first DNA nanodevices that...
Building better soybeans for a hot, dry, hungry world
21.4.2014 | Press monitoring
A new study shows that soybean plants can be redesigned to increase crop yields while requiring less water and helping to offset greenhouse gas warming. The study is the first to demonstrate that a major food crop can be modified to meet multiple goals at the same time. The study, led by Darren Drewry of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,...
Deadly human pathogen Cryptococcus fully sequenced
18.4.2014 | Press monitoring
Now researchers have sequenced the entire genome and all the RNA products of the most important pathogenic lineage of Cryptococcus neoformans, a strain called H99. The results, which appear April 17 in PLOS Genetics, also describe a number of genetic changes that can occur after laboratory handling of H99 that make it more susceptible to stress,...
