Prof Michael King of the University of Rochester has invented a device that filters the blood for cancer and stem cells. When he captures cancer cells, he kills them. When he captures stem cells, he harvests them for later use in tissue engineering, bone marrow transplants, and other health applications. This is a non-controversial way of obtaining stem cells that can be differentiated into other, useful cells.
Cornell researchers studied a virus related to the avian influenza virus to see whether a hypothetical mutated form of H5N1 could infect people through drinking and wastewater systems.
A set of guidelines have been developed that can help predict the risk of bacterial meningitis for children with cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis (presence of greater number of white blood cells than normal), reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and antibiotics, according to a study in the January 3 issue of JAMA.
In an advance in the emerging field of bacterial imaging, scientists are reporting development of a method for identifying specific sites of localized bacterial infections in living animals. Bradley D. Smith at the University of Notre Dame and colleagues describe the method in a report scheduled for the Jan. 10 edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a weekly publication.
The “resistance movement” founded by bacteria to combat antibiotics may be losing ground. By combining key properties of two different types of weapons used by the innate defense systems of organisms, a team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science has managed to design a more powerful weapon, hoping that this will provide a basis for novel and more effective antibiotics.
A unique Mayo Clinic collaboration has revived the healing wisdom of Pacific Island cultures by testing a therapeutic plant extract described in a 17th century Dutch herbal text for its anti-bacterial properties.
The high-resolution crystal structure of trimeric AcrB solved using DARPin inhibitors reveals insights into the drug export mechanism via hemi-channels in each subunit.
By incorporating the idea of a feedback resistor into the HIV Tat transcriptional circuit, and by using real-time imaging experiments, this study provides insight into how HIV enters periods of latency.
The air could be teeming with more than 1,800 types of bacteria, according to a first-of-its-kind census of airborne microbes recently conducted by scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Right now there’s no rapid way to diagnose sepsis, a fast-moving blood infection that is a leading cause of death in hospital intensive care units. New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that doctors one day could quickly distinguish sepsis from widespread non-infectious inflammation based on genetic profiles of patients’ blood.