Free Republic

A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed following the introduction of the 'Prevnar' conjugate polysaccharide vaccine, which substantially reduced rates of pneumococcal disease across the U.S. The work demonstrates that the technology could be used in the future to monitor the effectiveness of vaccination or antibiotic use against different species of bacterial...

Breakthrough approach to rapid detection of Candida species directly from whole blood with T2 Magnetic resonance demonstrated in first patient samples Lexington, MA, April 24, 2013 (Embargoed until 2:00 PM US Eastern Time) – T2 Biosystems, a company developing direct detection products enabling superior diagnostics, today announced the publication of research supporting the Company's flagship diagnostic test, T2Candida®, in Science Translational Medicine. The research highlights T2Candida as a breakthrough approach to rapid and sensitive identification of species-specific Candida, a sepsis-causing fungus, directly from whole blood in approximately three hours, or up to 25 times faster than the current gold standard...

A new bird flu strain that has killed 22 people in China is "one of the most lethal" of its kind and transmits more easily to humans than another strain that has killed hundreds since 2003, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Wednesday. The H7N9 flu has infected 108 people in China since it was first detected in March, according to the Geneva-based WHO. Although it is not clear exactly how people are being infected, experts say they see no evidence so far of the most worrisome scenario - sustained transmission between people. An international team of scientists...

A natural biochemical pathway that produces the antimalarial drug artemisinin in the sweet wormwood plant has been fully reconstructed in yeast. The engineered yeast cells churn out high concentrations of a precursor that can be converted in a few steps into the first-line malaria drug. According to the team behind the advance, their semi-synthetic route should help smooth out seasonal variations in supply.Semi-synthetic artemisinin has been in the pipeline since 2006, when Jay Keasling’s group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US, reported rewriting the genome of ordinary brewer’s yeast to encourage it to make artemisinic acid.1 But...

Volcanic vents off the coast of Italy are home to microbes that can produce a bulk industrial chemical © Science Photo LibraryUS researchers have engineered a heat-loving microbe to produce a bulk chemical from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Their results may provide a viable industrial alternative to blue-green algae, which have a much lower efficiency for such chemical transformations.Microbes are principally used by industry to turn larger organic compounds into smaller, more useful ones – fermenting corn sugars to produce ethanol, for instance. More desirable, though, is direct conversion of carbon dioxide into organic compounds.Current methods that use blue-green algae...

Study could aid development of more effective vaccines. For the first time, scientists have tracked in a patient the evolution of a potent immune molecule that recognizes many different HIV viruses. By revealing how these molecules — called broadly neutralizing antibodies — develop, the research could inform efforts to make vaccines that elicit similar antibodies that can protect people from becoming infected with HIV. The researchers, led by Barton Haynes of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, found that broadly neutralizing antibodies developed only after the population of viruses in the patient had diversified — something that...

New bird flu strand could be linked to dead pigs in Shanghai river: expert Staff Reporter2013-04-0115:37 (GMT+8) A worker cleaning up dead pigs out of the river. (Photo/Xinhua) The new strand of the bird flu that has already killed two people and left another critically ill in eastern China could be linked to the thousands of dead pigs found floating in a Shanghai river last month, according to a Hong Kong infectious disease expert. China's Ministry of Health and the National Health and Family Planning Commission announced on Sunday the world's first reported cases of the H7N9 virus, a new...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified a component of the herpesvirus that "hijacks" machinery inside human cells, allowing the virus to rapidly and successfully invade the nervous system upon initial exposure. Led by Gregory Smith, associate professor in immunology and microbiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, researchers found that viral protein 1-2, or VP1/2, allows the herpesvirus to interact with cellular motors, known as dynein. Once the protein has overtaken this motor, the virus can speed along intercellular highways, or microtubules, to move unobstructed from the tips of nerves in skin to the nuclei of neurons within the nervous...

Molecule changes shape to help organisms kick drugs out of cells. Japanese researchers have determined the detailed molecular structure of a protein that rids cells of toxins, but can also reduce the effectiveness of some antibiotics and cancer drugs by kicking them out of the cells they are targeting. The scientists have also identified a molecule that can thwart the activity of the protein, one of a class known as multidrug and toxic compound extrusion transporters (MATEs) that are found in cell membranes. The discovery suggests new approaches to combat antibiotic resistance and boost the power of cancer therapies, the...

Organisms living on tree roots do lion’s share of sequestering carbon Sequestration may be questionable fiscal policy, but it means good news in the context of carbon cycles. Vast underground networks of fungi may sequester heaps of carbon in boreal forest soil, a study suggests. By holding onto the element, the fungi do the environment a favor by preventing carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere and warming the planet. --snip-- But scientists have not understood where exactly trees put their carbon. The issue becomes important when researchers build computer simulations that track carbon cycling. “People talk about how plants...

Enlarge Image Microbe overhaul. Gastric bypass surgery changes the community of microbes in the gut, and a study suggests the new population might drive weight loss. Credit: Life in View/Science Source Usually, science starts in the lab and then moves to patients. Gastric bypass surgery has taken the opposite path. Originally offered as a radical treatment for severe obesity, the surgery's effects on the digestive system and metabolism have turned out to be far more mysterious and fascinating than anyone expected. Now, a new study probes another of the surgery's effects: its impact on microbes in the gut and...

A vial containing a potentially harmful virus has gone missing from a laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, officials said.The missing vial, which contains less than a quarter of a teaspoon an infectious disease, had been stored in a locked freezer, designed to handle biological material safely, within the Galveston National Laboratory on UTMB's campus, officials said. During a routine internal inspection last week, UTMB officials realized one vial of a virus called Guanarito was not accounted for at the facility. Scott Weaver, the laboratory's scientific director, said Guanarito is an emerging disease that has caused deadly diseases...

Experts are puzzled by a new study in which influenza vaccination seemed to provide little or no protection against flu in the 2010-11 season—and in which the only participants who seemed to benefit from the vaccine were those who hadn't been vaccinated the season before. The investigators recruited 328 households in Michigan before the flu season started and followed them through the season. Overall, they found that the infection risk was nearly the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated participants, indicating no significant vaccine-induced protection, according to their report in Clinical Infectious Diseases. That contrasted sharply with several other observational studies...

New York City health officials are urging some men to get vaccinated against meningitis amid an outbreak that has sickened 22 New Yorkers and killed seven. The dangerous strain of bacterial meningitis appears to be spreading through sexual encounters between men who meet through websites or smartphone apps, or at bars or parties, according to the City’s health department. More than half of the infected men have had HIV, a virus that attacks the immune system making infections more likely and more severe. “Vaccination is the best defense,” City health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said in a statement. “I urge...

Drawing on past toxicity problems scientists used an enlarged quinolone to improve selectivity for the malaria parasiteA new class of antimalarial drugs that is effective across various stages of the malaria parasite’s lifecycle has been developed by an international research team. Early indications also show that it may take longer for the parasite to develop resistance to the new molecules than it has for existing drugs targeting the same pathway.Malaria is a devastating disease worldwide, and the ability of the Plasmodium family of parasites that cause the disease to develop resistance to drugs leads to a constant arms race for...

File this under: What don’t we know?We just discovered slice “2″ is alive.  |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of...

Scientists are reporting "laboratory resurrections" of several 2-3-billion-year-old proteins that are ancient ancestors of the enzymes that enable today's antibiotic-resistant bacteria to shrug off huge doses of penicillins, cephalosporins and other modern drugs. The achievement, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, opens the door to a scientific "replay" of the evolution of antibiotic resistance with an eye to finding new ways to cope with the problem. Jose M. Sanchez-Ruiz, Eric A. Gaucher, Valeria A. Risso and colleagues explain that antibiotic resistance existed long before Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic in 1928. Genes that contain instructions for...

MRSA is one of a number of bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics © Science Photo LibraryGlobal research efforts to develop new antibiotics need to be accelerated urgently, the UK government’s chief medical officer has warned. She adds that that new drugs are desperately needed to fight the ‘catastrophic threat’ of growing antimicrobial resistance.In the second part of her annual report Dame Sally Davies focuses on antimicrobial resistance and infectious diseases. She says that the development of new antibiotics has stalled since the late 1980s because ‘there are fewer economic incentives’ to produce new antimicrobial agents than for other...

Origin of Theiler hepatitis was a century-old puzzle. For almost 100 years, veterinarians have puzzled over the cause of Theiler disease, a mysterious type of equine hepatitis that is linked to blood products and causes liver failure in up to 90% of afflicted animals. A team of US scientists has now discovered that the disease is caused by a virus that shares just 35% of its amino acid sequences with its closest-known relative. The team named it Theiler disease-associated virus (TDAV), and published the discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Led by Amy Kistler at the...

It's not quite the ‘elephant in the room’, but an 18 megadalton viral assembly is perhaps the biggest thing in the mass spectrometer (MS). Dutch and US researchers have used quadrupole time-of-flight (QToF) native MS to investigate intact capsids from a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. While there is theoretically no upper limit on the mass of a particle that might be analysed using ToF MS, the work is far from trivial in breaking through the record.The late John Fenn shared the 2002 Nobel prize in chemistry for his pioneering work on electrospray ionisation techniques in mass...