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What did Stephen Hawking and Mao Zedong have in common? They both suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), for which a cure remains elusive. Scientists took an important step toward the prevention of ALS and another brain disorder called Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) with their research on the effects of the antibiotic rifampicin on genetically modified mice. "The primary cause of FTD and ALS is a hexanucleotide repeat expansion (HRE) in non-coding regions of the C9orf72 gene," said Professor Takami Tomiyama. This mutation causes neurodegeneration through loss-of-function or gain-of-toxic-function mutations.Rifampicin is an antibiotic that slows bacterial RNA production; it is usually...

According to new research published this week in the journal Nature, an acyldepsipeptide antibiotic called ADEP in combination with the bactericidal antibiotic drug rifampicin eliminates the methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.This scanning electron micrograph shows the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Image credit: NIAID. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium that is resistant to many antibiotics. It is responsible for several chronic infections such as osteomyelitis, endocarditis, or infections of implanted medical devices. These infections are often incurable, even when appropriate antibiotics are used.Senior author of the study, Prof Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, suspected that a different adaptive function of bacteria...

There may be as many as 300,000 new cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis a year in the world, and 79 percent of them are "superstrains," resistant to any three of the four first-line drugs, a World Health Organization survey has found. Patients in the former Soviet bloc countries are 10 times as likely to have drug-resistant strains as those elsewhere in the world, the survey said. The researchers said the drug-resistance problem might be much bigger than they could measure, particularly in countries like India and China, where they had surveyed only a few areas, and in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria and...