Infectious bronchitis virus causes devastating losses to the poultry industry but scientists are now developing a new way to vaccinate chicks against the disease — one that can be delivered while they are still in their egg. Researchers have used a “reverse genetic” system to produce a new vaccine strain which is safe to deliver to chicks while they are still in the egg, making it more effective than current vaccines.
Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center have discovered a novel gene mutation associated with Wilms tumor, the most common pediatric kidney cancer. The newly identified gene is mutated in about 30 percent of cases of Wilms tumor and is located on the sex-determining X chromosome, which means that a single altered copy would be sufficient for tumor formation. The new gene does not appear linked to inherited forms of the disease.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a tiny piece of genetic code apparently goes where no bit of it has gone before, and it gets there under its own internal code.
A team of University of California, San Diego physicists and neuroscientists has discovered a bottleneck in the network of blood vessels in the brain that makes it vulnerable to strokes. The finding may explain the origin of the puzzling damage to the brain?s gray matter often detected in brain scans, especially among the elderly.
Neuroscientists at Duke University have mapped the timing and sequence of neural activations that unfold in the brain when people focus their attention on specific locations in their visual fields.
Estrogen regulates the brain’s energy metabolism in the same way as the hormone leptin, leading the way to a viable approach to tackling obesity in people resistant to leptin, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in the Dec_31 online issue of Nature Medicine.
Telephone outreach can dramatically increase the incidence of screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) in an urban minority population, according to a new study published in the December 2006 issue of American Journal of Public Health.
A University of Vermont study suggests that the astrocytic BK channel is an important participant in the cellular process responsible for signaling regional blood flow changes in the brain, providing a new key to understanding such disorders as stroke, migraine and Alzheimer’s disease.
Stefanos A. Zenios, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, renowned for his application of Operations Research to tackle some of modern medicine’s thorniest problems, has completed new research that could revolutionize kidney allocation for transplant waiting list candidates. The paper, “Recipient Choice Can Address the Efficiency-Equity Trade-Off in Kidney Transplantation: A Mechanism Design Model,” was recently published in the journal Management Science.
A new University of Georgia study suggests that rapid detection combined with aggressive education can dramatically curtail outbreaks of emerging infectious disease such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).