MicrobeWorld

Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new m... Read More

Marshall W. Nirenberg, a biologist who deciphered the genetic code of life, earning a Nobel Prize for his achievement, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

The cause was cancer, said his stepdaughter Susan Weissman.

In solving the genetic code, Dr. Nirenberg established the rul... Read More

Zebrafish need Prozac like they need a bicycle, yet recording how various molecules affect their behaviour may be the perfect way to discover treatments for mental illness and neurological diseases.

Most brain drugs are variations on 50-year-old medicines, says Randall Peterson of Massachuset... Read More

It's not thinking in the way humans, dogs or even birds think, but new findings from researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, show that bacteria are more capable of complex decision-making than previously known.

The discovery sets a landmark in research to understand the way bac... Read More

As the dreaded autumn wave ends and official deaths remain relatively low, the backlash against the H1N1 pandemic response is in full swing. Claims range from a massive overreaction by health authorities to a conspiracy cooked up by big pharma. But while swine flu may have boosted profits for va... Read More

Retroviruses such as HIV and HTLV-1 don't hit-and-run, they hit-and-hide. They slip into host cells and insert their own DNA into the cell's DNA, and from this refuge they establish an infection that lasts a lifetime.

But that infection might be much less troublesome and much more manageable ... Read More

Nowadays, even Fido fears the flu.

Boarding kennels and shelters in at least eight states -- New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, Colorado, Georgia and Florida -- saw outbreaks of canine influenza virus last year. The highly contagious respiratory infection targets dogs of ... Read More

Thomas Cavalier-Smith, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, has published a paper in which he identifies some of the key elements to understanding eukaryogenesis.

"Here I paint an integrated picture of how the nucleus, sex, and the eukaryotic cell cycle originated and congealed into ... Read More

San Diego-based Optimer Pharmaceuticals has nailed the second big trial designed to prove it has a new antibiotic for a deadly infection people can get in hospitals.

Optimer said today that it reached its main goal of showing its experimental antibiotic, fidaxomicin, was roughly equivalent to... Read More

H1N1 (swine flu) has killed 12,799 people worldwide since the virus first emerged, the WHO said on Friday, United Press International reports (1/8). According to the WHO, more than half of the H1N1-related deaths worldwide occurred in the Americas, China Daily reports (1/9).

"The WHO's tally ... Read More

Marching to their own drummer. That's what bacteria from different environments do when turning toxic, mobile selenium into a less dangerous, non-mobile form, according to a study led by Dr. Carolyn Pearce. Pearce, formerly of the University of Manchester, is now conducting her research at Pacif... Read More

Tomorrow is the start of my new virology course at Columbia University. The course, Biology W3310, is aimed at advanced undergraduates and will be taught at the Morningside Campus of Columbia University. Read More

One commercially available Echinacea purpurea extract preparation may be effective in preventing swine flu, a laboratory study published in the Nov 2009 issue of Virology suggests.

Vaccine is believed at least by the government and many medical organizations to be the best measure against swi... Read More

A new poll found the majority of parents have gotten or intend to get their children vaccinated against swine flu, but the majority of adults have not gotten or do not want swine flu vaccine for themselves.

The poll by Harvard School of Public Health shows 44 percent believe the H1N1 flu pand... Read More

With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix a... Read More

Google just launched an updated version of Google Flu Trends, a service that predicts flu trends by tracking flu related queries on the company's search engine. Until now, Google only showed aggregate data for states in the United States. Starting today, Flu Trends will show data down to the cit... Read More

A European Commission consortium said today that it plans to pump as much as €8.5 million ($12.4 million) over the next three years into its international effort to fund genomic studies of human pathogens and to develop ways to combat them.

In its third funding call, the ERA-NET PathoGenoMics... Read More

In the Feb. 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Laurel Lenz, PhD, and his colleagues report that macrophages infected by the bacteria Listeria release interferon-αβ (IFN- αβ), which makes them and nearby immune cells unresponsive to activation signals. This reduces immune resistanc... Read More

Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world.

Usually, the volunteers -- sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations age... Read More

China's reckless use of antibiotics in its health system and agricultural production is fuelling an explosion of drug-resistant superbugs that threaten global health.

Scientists have warned that Chinese doctors routinely prescribe multiple doses of antibiotics for sore throats, while farmers'... Read More