Scientists are reporting development and initial laboratory tests of an imaging agent that shows promise for detecting the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the brain -- signs that now can't confirm a diagnosis until after patients have died. Their report appears in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.

These new data are an essential step towards understanding the operation of these key cells in the immune system, and they could provide a new therapeutic approach to fighting infection. They also suggest that the operation of NK cells must be precisely regulated to guarantee an optimum immune reaction.

In the chemistry of the living world, a pair of nucleic acids -- DNA and RNA -- reign supreme. As carrier molecules of the genetic code, they provide all organisms with a mechanism for faithfully reproducing themselves as well as generating the myriad proteins vital to living systems. Yet according to John Chaput, a researcher at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics, at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute^®, it may not always have been so.

Angiogenic sprouting, the process by which new blood vessels grow from existing vessels, is a double-edged sword. It enables the cardiovascular system to develop in the embryo, and is vital for tissue regeneration in adults. But it also supplies growing tumors with nutrients and oxygen.

The most effective anti-malaria drug can now be produced inexpensively and in large quantities. This means that it will be possible to provide medication for the 225 million malaria patients in developing countries at an affordable price. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in ...

There are about 2,500 Chinese white dolphins in the Pearl River Delta region, the body of water between Macau and Hong Kong, with the majority of the mammals in Chinese waters and the rest in Hong Kong.

But experts say their number has dropped significantly in the past few years due to overfishing, an increase in maritime traffic, water pollution, habitat loss and coastal development.

The blood-brain barrier is essential for maintaining the brain's stable environment -- preventing entry of harmful viruses and bacteria and isolating the brain's specific hormonal and neurotransmitter activity from that in the rest of the body.

A biology lab at Washington University has just cracked the structure and function of a protein that plays a key role in the life of a parasite that killed 655,000 people in 2010. The protein is an enzyme that Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that causes the most lethal form of malaria, uses to make cell membrane. The protozoan cannot survive without this enzyme, but even though the enzyme has many lookalikes in other organisms, people do not make it. Together these characteristics make the enzyme an ideal target for new antimalarial drugs.

In the world of biomolecules such as proteins and the hereditary nucleic acids DNA and RNA, three-dimensional structure determines function. Analysis of the passage of such molecules through nanopores offers a relatively new, but highly promising, technique for obtaining information about their spatial conformations.

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have shown one way in which poor nutrition in the womb can put a person at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes and other age-related diseases in later life. This finding could lead to new ways of identifying people who are at a higher risk of developing these diseases and might open up targets for treatment.

Researchers describe how increased production of a microRNA promotes progressive muscle deterioration in a mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), according to a study published online on January 2 in the Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org).