EurekAlert! InContext Modules

Public Release: 13-Jun-2012

Nature
Normal bacterial makeup has huge implications for health, says CU professor
For the first time a consortium of researchers organized by the National Institutes of Health, including a University of Colorado Boulder professor, has mapped the normal microbial makeup of healthy humans.

National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 13-Jun-2012

PLOS Genetics
IU role in Human Microbiome Project exposes battle history between bacteria, viruses in human body
An Indiana University team of researchers has conducted the most in-depth and diverse genetic analysis of the defense systems that trillions of microorganisms in the human body use to fend off viruses.

National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 13-Jun-2012

PLOS ONE
Consortium of scientists maps the human body's bacterial ecosystem
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes today are announcing their role in an unprecedented collaboration organized by the National Institutes of Health, which used groundbreaking methods to vastly improve our understanding of bacteria that reside in and on the human body.

San Simeon Fund, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 13-Jun-2012

Nature
Human Microbiome Project finds vast individuality in healthy human bacterial populations
In attempting to determine whether there were particular types of bacteria that were common, or "core", across all the human subjects in the HMP cohort, researchers found some bacteria that were common to 95 percent of all subjects at the sample sites. The largest number of core bacteria were found at the mouth sites, and the least in the vagina. Abundances of the core species, however, varied widely, indicating the strong individuality of each subject's microbiome.

National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 12-Jun-2012

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
UTMB researchers create powerful new method to analyze genetic data
Researchers have developed a powerful visual analytical approach to explore genetic data, enabling scientists to identify novel patterns of information that could be crucial to human health.

National Institutes of Health, NIH/National Library of Medicine, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 12-Jun-2012
BGI, GE Healthcare team up on pioneering stem cell science projects
GE Healthcare, the healthcare business of GE, and BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, jointly announced today a pioneering multi-year research collaboration in stem cell science.

Public Release: 12-Jun-2012

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
Living microprocessor tunes in to feedback
What keeps the machinery for chopping certain precursor RNA strands into functional pieces from cutting up the wrong kinds of RNA?

Public Release: 11-Jun-2012
Loh launches UMD innovation outreach to Taiwan, Korea
University of Maryland President Wallace Loh is extending his Asia strategy with a nine-day innovation tour of Taiwan and South Korea. In his third trip to the region, Loh will lay the groundwork for new, substantial research and educational partnerships through sessions with high-level government, industry and academic officials. He has identified the Asia-Pacific region as the likely epicenter of international economic activity this century. "Science and education transcend borders," Loh says.

Public Release: 10-Jun-2012

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
Researchers watch tiny living machines self-assemble
Enabling bioengineers to design new molecular machines for nanotechnology applications is one of the possible outcomes of a study by University of Montreal researchers that was published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology today. The scientists have developed a new approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are caused by errors in assembly.

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Le fond de recherché du Québec, Nature et Technologie

Public Release: 8-Jun-2012

Big Data
New peer-reviewed journal on big data launching in Fall 2012
In a world where we create over two quintillion bytes of data every day, global leaders in academia, industry, and government are grappling with the problem of how to organize, store, evaluate, share, and protect this vast amount of information.

Public Release: 7-Jun-2012

Bioinspiration & Biomimetics
Engineered robot interacts with live fish
A bioinspired robot has provided the first experimental evidence that live zebrafish can be influenced by engineered robots.

Public Release: 6-Jun-2012
International consortium announce the first complete sequencing of pear genome
International consortium led by Chinese scientists announce the first complete sequencing of pear genome.

Public Release: 6-Jun-2012

PLOS ONE
Microbial communities shifted dramatically after Deepwater Horizon spill
Communities of microbial organisms -- species such as nematodes, protists and fungi -- on beaches along the Gulf of Mexico changed significantly following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, research from the University of New Hampshire's Hubbard Center for Genome Studies and partners found. The findings analyzed marine sediments from five Gulf Coast sites prior to and several months following shoreline oiling.

National Science Foundation

Public Release: 6-Jun-2012

Science Translational Medicine
Baby's genome deciphered prenatally from parents' lab tests
Maternal blood sampled at 18 weeks into a pregnancy and a paternal saliva specimen contained enough information for scientists to map the fetus' whole genome. Fetal DNA is in a pregnant women's bloodstream starting a few weeks after conception. Scientists assessed many and more subtle variations in the fetus' genome, down to a one-letter change in the DNA code, compared to current tests that screen for only a few major genetic errors.

NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute, Washington Research Foundation

Public Release: 5-Jun-2012
Scientists work together to achieve milestone against deadly diseases
Investigators at the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases and the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease reached a significant milestone by determining 1,000 protein structures from infectious disease organisms. The knowledge gained from these structures should lead to new interventions for the deadly diseases caused by these pathogens.

NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services

Public Release: 4-Jun-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
New technology improves malaria control and vaccine development
A new technique that accurately determines the risk of infants in endemic countries developing clinical malaria could provide a valuable tool for evaluating new malaria prevention strategies and vaccines. The technique could even help to understand how anti-malarial vaccine and treatment strategies act to reduce malaria, say researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, University of Basel and the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research.

Swiss National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Victorian Government

Public Release: 4-Jun-2012
June 2012 story tips from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Windshields, windows, solar panels, eyeglasses, heart stents and hundreds of other products representing a multi-billion-dollar market are potential targets for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's thin-film superhydrophobic technology. Wireless sensors that could help the steel industry save money and reduce energy use and emissions are being put to the test at Commercial Metals Co. in Cayce, S.C.

Public Release: 4-Jun-2012

Science Signaling
U of S researchers create powerful new tool for research and drug development
A research team led by Tony Kusalik and Scott Napper has harnessed bioinformatics and molecular biology to create powerful software that promises to become a "must have" tool in drug development research labs the world over. The software is used to analyze kinases – a type of enzyme involved in virtually every cellular function, from energy use and reproduction to modifying gene expression. A demonstration of its effectiveness recently appeared in the journal Science Signalling.

Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Genome Canada, Alberta Meat and Livestock Agency, Beef Cattle Research Council

Public Release: 3-Jun-2012

Nature Genetics
Latest genomic studies shed new light on maize diversity and evolution
BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, together with other 17 international institutes, announced that they completed the second generation of maize HapMap and genomics studies on maize domestication and improvement. The two separate studies were published online in the same issue of Nature Genetics.

Public Release: 1-Jun-2012
New release of Web-based resource resolves confusion over plant names
Up to 30 percent of the plant names in major biological databases are incorrect in some way, sowing confusion among scientists. A web-based resource, the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service went live today, and should leave much less room for name-related errors.

National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture

Public Release: 1-Jun-2012
Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project
Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory reached an important milestone today, publicly releasing the first installment out of 500 terabytes of data so far collected in their pathbreaking project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse.

National Institutes of Health, Keck Foundation

Public Release: 31-May-2012

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Singing in the rain: Technology improves monitoring of bird sounds
Researchers have created a new computer technology that can listen to multiple bird sounds at one time to identify which species are present and how they may be changing as a result of habitat loss or climate change. It's one of the first of its type, and should provide an automated approach to ecological monitoring of bird species that is much more practical than a human sitting in the field, hours on end.

National Science Foundation

Public Release: 31-May-2012

Nature Genetics
Rewriting DNA to understand what it says
New Weizmann Institute technology speeds up DNA "rewriting" and measures the effects of the changes in living cells.

Public Release: 30-May-2012
OSC's Oakley Cluster delivers on performance efficiency
The Ohio Supercomputer Center's newest system, the HP/Intel Xeon Oakley Cluster, would fall in the top half of the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers based purely on speed, but the cluster would rank even higher -- ninth in the United States and second among US academic institutions -- when comparing benchmarked performances against the maximum theoretical performance of the system.

State of Ohio

Public Release: 30-May-2012

Nature
An international consortium sequences tomato genome
The Tomato Genome Consortium, a group of over 300 scientists from 13 countries, has sequenced the genomes of the domesticated tomato and its wild ancestor, Solanum pimpinellifolium. This achievement is expected to lower costs and speed up efforts to improve the worldwide tomato production, making it better equipped to combat the pests, pathogens, droughts and diseases that now plague growers. The work may also speed up improvements to other crops. The sequences were reported in this week's issue of Nature.

European Union, Ghent University, Flanders Institute for Biotechnology


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