Glasgow's Professor Julian Dow has also been able to follow the real-time formation of kidney stones under the microscope.

'Unlike the human kidney, the simple fruit fly kidney tubule is easily accessible and transparent; and unlike us, fruit flies seem quite unconcerned by the presence of stones,'said Dow. 'This means that we can now screen fruit flies for compound that can stop new stones forming, and so one day perhaps we will be able to offer protection against recurrence for patients with a history of stone formation.'

There is a 60% risk of recurrence of kidney stones,  even after high strength pain killers and ultrasound, and preventative treatments have been hindered by an inability to find a suitable model system - stones are just as agonising for lab animals as humans.

The teams have identified a gene which encodes a protein that transports oxalate into the fly kidney, when knocked down genetically, the fly gets fewer stones. This means the group have a specific target to study as a candidate for drug development.

Dow and Davies labs are now successfully modelling a class of diseases called inborn errors of metabolism, for example rosy, a well-known mutant , develops orange kidney stones and deformed kidney tubules just like the rare human genetic disorder xanthinuria. In collaboration with Strathclyde Unversity, they are using the new science of metabolomics to study how such mutations cause some compounds to accumulate to very high levels, while others are severely depleted.

Source:  Labnews UK

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This voluntary pause recommends that two research groups withhold key data from pending publications on H5N1. Both describe specific mutations in the virus' genome that could allow it to be transmitted as droplets between ferrets, the standard model for mammal to mammal transmissions.

The papers contain information about methods and mutations that could help public health officials and researchers understand virus transmission and predict and prevent the next influenza pandemic. Researchers proved that viruses possessing haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets, but more research is needed to determine how influenza viruses in nature become human pandemic threats.

However, the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) recommend that the papers be withheld for fear that this information may make it into the hands of bioterrorists.

There is a perceived fear that ferret transmissible H5 HA viruses may escape from the lab which has led to an intense debate in the media. The 60-day pause will allow time for international discussion on this type of research, which some say has the potential to help bioterrorists. 

Source: labnews

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Also read about Associate Professor Ben Hankamer's research on biofuel production from microalgae at the University of Queensland.

David Lewis was introduced to algae during his PhD, which he spent working out ways to control the unwanted blue-green algae in drinking-supply reservoirs. He subsequently took up an academic position in the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Adelaide and stayed with algae as the basis for his research program.

However, being a good chemical engineer, his thinking shifted to converting this raw material into real products and culminated in Lewis setting up the Microalgal Engineering Research Group within the School in 2003.

The group's first project involved turning algae into feedstock for aquaculture, which is an important and growing industry in Australia, particularly so in South Australia, with the established oyster and burgeoning tuna farming industry.

"One of the bottlenecks in aquaculture is the production of live feed,"says Lewis. "So we were looking for different ways to optimise the growth of algae for this purpose." In undertaking that project, Lewis learnt lots about the composition of algae, including one interesting thing he didn't previously realise: these tiny plants are chock-a block full of oil

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Source:      Australian Life Scientist
 

"In contrast, a hundred meters sprinter who moves his legs only a few times per second moves like a snail" said Frank Schnorrer, who led the research at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.

Muscles used in flight are unique, their contractions are regulated by nerve impulses as usual, but are also triggered by tension. Each fly has two types of flight muscle which enable wing oscillations - one to move the wings down, while at the same time stretching the other type to induce a contraction to pull the wings up again.

By targeted gene silencing, Schnorrer's research group 'Muscle Dynamics' were able to identify the switch essential for the formation of flight muscles: the transcription factor Spalt. It exists only in flight muscles and is responsible for the specific architecture of their microfibrils which enable the contraction of muscles in response to applied tension. It also plays an important role in the transcription of the genetic information into RNA and proteins necessary in the respective cell type.

"The gene Spalt is essential for the generation of the ultrafast super muscles,"said Schnorrer. "Without Spalt, the fly builds only normal leg muscles instead of flight muscles."

The flight muscles no longer responded to tension, and behave like normal leg muscles. The scientists also succeeded in creating flight muscle-like muscles in the fly's legs by only inserting spalt.

source:  Labnews

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The bizarre living quarters of the pygmy bluetongue lizard had fooled experts into thinking it was extinct until the 1990s, when it was rediscovered in Burra in the state's Mid-North.

A $510,000 grant from the Australian Research Council, announced this week, will help Flinders University build on biological knowledge about the lizard to develop programs for monitoring and maintaining viable populations, advising landholders of management options, and informing and involving communities in conservation.

The lead researcher, Biological Sciences Professor Mike Bull, said there were small populations of the lizards, unique to the state, dotted around the Mid-North.

"No one thought about looking for lizards down spider holes. Once we worked that out it made it easier to find them," he said.

Source:   Adelaide Now

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The researchers, led by Dr David Elliott, and Professors Andrew Elefanty and Ed Stanley of Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, trialled the technique with heart cells 'cardiomyocytes' by turning them green.

They inserted a green fluorescent protein gene from jelly fish at a gene locus that is known to be expressed in heart cells throughout life, NKX2-5.

This turned the heart cells green, making them easily distinguished from the other cell types in the stem cell culture.

Source:  Australian lIfe Scientist

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According to Professor Harvey Millar, before photosynthesis begins again after dawn, such crops can return as much as 70 per cent of the carbon they captured from the atmosphere the previous day. The rest is retained as biomass: cellulose, lignin, starch, oils and sugars.

Millar says understanding what happens during the transition from photosynthesis to dark respiration and back again is crucial to accurate modelling of global carbon storage by plants, particularly as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise to the highest levels in the past 20 million years.

Tilting the balance between the two competing processes to increase carbon storage by just a few per cent could be doubly beneficial: it could increase crop yields, especially for the big three global crops of wheat, rice and maize by millions of tonnes; meanwhile sequestering more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the form of biomass

The biochemical reactions involved in energy production and respiration take place in mitochondria in the plants leaves and green tissues.

'We dont know much about how respiration rate is actually determined, even though weve known for a long time that plants markedly change their respiration rate during the day-night cycle.' says Millar.

Nobody believed the proteome could be changing rapidly enough to be a significant factor in the change in respiration. It was assumed to be a simple matter of substrate supply and demand.

A PhD student in Millar's laboratory at the University of Western Australia, Chung Pong Lee, set out to investigate the mitochondrial events that underlie the transition from photosynthesis to dark respiration and the accompanying changes in respiration rate, and made a remarkable discovery.

'It was a demanding work, involving purifying mitochondria from the leaves of growing plants and analysing the proteome at timed intervals throughout the day-night cycle'. says Millar

Source: Australian life scientist

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The breakthrough promises to provide a solution to the iron and zinc deficiency disorders that affect billions of people throughout the world.

Dr Alex Johnson, from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, says the genetically modified rice has up to four times more iron than conventional rice and twice as much zinc.

"We just tricked the plant into thinking it doesn't have enough iron," he said. "By making the plant think it doesn't have enough iron, it takes up more iron and it puts more iron into the grain."

Rice is the main food source for roughly half the world's population including billions of people in developing countries across Asia, but the polished grain is too low in iron, zinc and Vitamin A to meet dietary needs.

Source:  Adelaide Now

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Associate Professor Tim Ward said researchers, including 22 students from the University of Adelaide and Flinders University, took part in the project.

They studied the diets and habitats of 47 predator groups including fish, squid, seals and seabirds in the eastern Great Australian Bight.

While many different animals ate sardines, none was found to dine on them exclusively.

The sardine's biggest fan was a seabird, the crested tern, for which the sardine made up 20 to 30 per cent of its diet.

Associate Professor Ward said the total sardine population in the eastern Great Australian Bight was estimated at about 200,000 tonnes.

But he said 34,000 tonnes could be taken every year without any problems.

"Fishing increases the productivity of the stock, so you get higher recruitment, higher growth rates," he said. "This fishery might be able to withstand an exploitation rate of 30 per cent. If we wanted to really push it hard and catch the maximum sustainable yield out of the stock it might be 30 per cent, which would equate to 60,000 tonnes perhaps.

"But we don't do that, we have a conservative 15 per cent. The difference is in part to recognise the importance of sardines in the ecosystem."

Harvested sardines are mostly fish food for farmed tuna, but the market for human consumption is growing.

Source:  Adelaide Now

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"Although these quantities are very small, the differences are apparent and could be due to the production processes or raw materials used in manufacturing" said Carol Blanco, professor of food technology at the university.

The beer with the highest iron content was a dark Spanish beer, with 165ppb, and a dark Mexican beer, which had 130ppb. Those with the lowest level of iron content originated in The Netherlands, 41ppb, and Ireland, which had 47ppb.

The study, published in Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, indicated that the higher iron content in dark beer could be explained by the malt and hop extracts used to produce it.

The filtering stage in pale beer production uses diatomaceous earth, a sedimentary rock with micro-algae which traps the iron, causing the concentrations to decrease. Non-alcoholic beer is subjected to vacuum evaporation to remove the alcohol, which also removed the iron.

Source:  Labnews

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Over 10 years he secured funding, purchased equipment and established the Flinders Proteomics Facility - the first of its kind in the state - which is available to scientists from other research organisations including universities, hospitals and CSIRO.

The 'champion of protein analysis' was named Unsung Hero of South Australian Science at the state launch of National Science Week.

The judges were looking for someone actively involved in SA science over the long term, who had not yet received significant recognition for their contribution.

But Dr Chataway said he didn't need formal recognition - and expected most scientists would feel the same way.

"Unsung is probably the key word," he said. "We're in this job because we like it. We really enjoy it, we enjoy the unknown, working out puzzles, solving problems and helping other people."

Source:  Adelaide Now

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National science week is a government initiative now in its 13th year, aiming to raise awareness and to celebrate the key part which science plays in our lives.

Professor Alistair Craig from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine is conducting the study along with Professor Georges Grau's laboratory at the University of Sydney and the ithree Institute headed by Professor Ian Charles.

Malaria infection kills and affects millions of people worldwide, with the greatest share of this impact on countries that can ill afford the costs associated with treatment," said Charles.

Source:  Life Scientist

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Many things are too small to be seen by the naked eye. And some are even too small to be seen through a conventional microscope.

But a super resolution fluorescence microscope is no ordinary microscope. A team at the University of New South Wales led byAssociate Professor Katharina Gaus and PhD candidate David Williamson have used the only super resolution fluorescence microscope of its kind in Australia to reveal a crucial feature that enables T cells to function.

T cells, the soldiers of the immune system, need to be switched on in order to perform their protective role. The long-standing question has been: how?

Gaus and her team have now honed in on the particular molecular switch that spurs T cells into action. That molecule is the adaptor protein, Lat. However, how Lat triggered the required signalling was a mystery until the recent advance in super reolution microscopy.

Such a discovery wouldn?t have been possible using conventional microscopes ? it took the light defying power of the super resolution fluorescence microscope to hone in on the fine detail of how the individual proteins interact.

Previously you could see T cells under a microscope but you couldn't see what their individual molecules were doing - Dr Gaus said. Using the new microscope the scientists were able to image molecules as small as 10 nanometres.

PhD candidate David Williamson, whose research formed the basis of the paper, said the discovery showed what could be achieved with the new generation of super-resolution fluorescence microscopes.

In conventional microscopy, all the target molecules are lit up at once and individual molecules become lost amongst their neighbours ? it's like trying to follow a conversation in a crowd where everyone is talking at once.

Source:    Australian Life Scientist

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Peter Leedman has a very clear memory of his eureka! moment. In 2006, PhD student Rebecca Webster told him she had positively identified a novel interaction between a microRNA (miRNA) molecule and a key target in cancer, the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR).

Webster confidently assured Leedman that the three prime untranslated region (3? UTR) of the messenger RNA for human EGFR was almost certainly a target for microRNA-7 (miR-7). 3? UTR is a region on a messenger RNA (mRNA) that is not used in translation into a protein.

Rebecca had to generate her own algorithm to predict microRNA binding sites, because this was before the birth of TargetScan and other microRNA target prediction web sites that are readily available today - says Leedman.

Source:  Australian Life Scientist

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The benefit that will be most apparent to our customers will be the ability of Overture's cutting edge design to speed up the synthesis of peptides and tackle increasingly challenging molecules, said Dr Laurent Caron, Peptide Core Technology Manager at CRB.

The peptide libraries produced by Overture can identify vitally important epitopes that cause peoples? immune systems to react and which may be the key to developing new treatments.

Alison White, operations director at CRB said: 'The Overture will be a significant asset in helping CRB to maintain its leading position as a high quality peptide manufacturer in a fast moving and evolving market.

CRB produce custom-made peptide and antibody tools, supplying researchers in pharmaceutical, life sciences and academic sectors. The provide laboratory scale reagents for proof of principle studies within early phase drug discovery and support biomarker programmes in clinical studies.

source:   Labnews UK

The result is a reprogramming of the nucleus from the original differentiated somatic cell into a totipotent stem cell, which has the potential to form an entirely new animal, as it did in the case of Dolly, spawned as she was from a mammary cell.

Alternatively, instead of producing an adult clone, embryonic stem cells can be harvested from the blastocyst cells that will be genetically compatible with the somatic nucleus donor.

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source:   Life Scientist

In the week since the federal budget was released there has been relief expressed by many in the health and medical sectors,  due to the Gillard governement's ongoing commitment to research funding. This comes after cabinet leaks suggested the government was considering cutting $400 million from the NHMRC budget over three years.

In the wake of the rumoured cuts researchers and supporters of health and medical research took to the streets to protest the reductions in funding.

Scientists expressed relief that the government had chosen to maintain existing levels of funding increases in the current budget.

'It is a relief to see the government recognises the importance of medical research for Australians and for the economy', said Professor Doug Hilton, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne

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Source:  Life Scientist

Although relatively new to his postdoc career, Dr Mark Shackleton, medical oncologist and founder of the Melanoma Research Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, has already made his impression on the world of cancer biology.

His research has rapidly expanded current knowledge into how melanomas grow and progress, with the aim of finding better ways to treat and prevent this disease, including those patients under his own care.

Melanoma is an all-too-real disease for many people in Australia. It causes significant morbidity and mortality in this country, being one of the most common causes of cancer deaths in younger adults and therefore also a leading source of productive working years lost.

Despite these sobering statistics, the incidence of melanoma keeps increasing and effective therapies for patients with advanced disease continue to evade scientists and clinicians.

Picture:  Dr Mark Shackleton

Source:    Life scientist

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Excepting basal and squamous cell carcinomas of the skin, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second greatest cause of cancer deaths in men, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

The latest data indicates that around 19,400 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and that nearly 3000 of these die from the disease, more than the number of deaths caused by breast cancer in women.

China is not only a growing economic powerhouse, but has also increased its scientific output dramatically over the past two decades.

Picture:  Innovation minister, Senator Kim Carr

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Source:  Life Scientist

Professor Ian Chubb already has had an illustrious career as a neuroscientist and as vice chancellor or deputy vice chancellor of some of Australia's most prestigious universities, including most recently the Australian National University from 2001 to 2011.

He was also announced ACT Australian of the Year in 2011.

The Chief Scientist role is one of a liaison with government over issues involving science, innovation and technology.

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Source: Life Scientist

Several studies underlined abnormal eye movements in these atypical Parkinsonian syndromes, all of which used three of the above mentioned systems (EOG, IR and SSC) to record eye movements. Some studies showed that the major criteria to help clinicians deliver the appropriate diagnosis was based on the horizontal and vertical velocity of eye movements, which could be easily obtained with the VOG method.

A research and clinical team from the French Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, led by Prof Marie Vidhailet, uses eye movement examination to help diagnose Parkinsonian disorders. Thanks to the recording and the analysis of eye movements, the team is able to differentiate three of the main Parkinsonian disorders: PSP, CBD and MSA. Dr Bertrand Gaymard from the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital reports that the brain areas implied in eye movement are well known. If the eye movement analysis detects an abnormality, we know quite precisely which structure of the brain is responsible for the abnormality. Since the Parkinsonian disorders involve different brain areas, it is thus possible to differentiate them by determining which parameters of eye movements are abnormal. For the clinical examination, the team uses an Eye Brain Tracker from e(ye)BRAIN, currently the only company specialised in developing a medical device for the clinical evaluation of eye movement. The Eye Brain Tracker was specifically developed in collaboration with the team of the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital.

The eye movement examination involves the display of visual stimulations on a computer screen and the recording of eye movements, followed by their analysis.

One of the tests is called gap. It involves the display of a fixation cross in the centre of the screen for 2500 to 3500ms, and then removing the fixation cross for a time gap of 200ms, followed by the appearance of the target on the right or on the left of the screen for 1000ms. This sequence is repeated for one minute, and patients have to look at the fixation cross and the target when it appears.

The test allows the examination of reflexive saccades, which are rapid eye movements shifting the line of sight between successive points of fixation. Different parameters of the saccades are automatically extracted and compared to normal values. One of these parameters is the reaction time (latency), which is the interval between the appearance of the target and the time when saccades start; while others include the saccadic velocity or the saccadic trajectory.

A second test is the so-called up down test, where the fixation cross is presented again for 2500 to 3500ms. After that the fixation cross is removed and a target is presented for 1000ms above or below the preceding position, without a time gap. This sequence is then repeated for one minute. The patient has to look at the fixation cross and the target when they appear. Measured parameters are the same as in the case of the gap test.

A third type of examination is the antisaccades test. This allows the investigation of the control of voluntary saccades. Patients are required to suppress a saccade (the prosaccade) toward a stimulus that appears in the periphery of the vision, and asked to generate a voluntary saccade of equal size to the opposite side (the antisaccade) instead. Again, the stimuli displayed are the same as during the gap test, while the analysed parameters include the number of errors as well as latency.

In a further test, called pursuit, a target is moving either horizontally or vertically, which the patients should follow. Here, examiners analyse the presence of jerks at the eye movements.

Thus, during eye tracking experiments, various parameters are evaluated  including reaction time, eye movement velocity, eye trajectory, and the accuracy of the gaze  besides cognitive functions like preparation, activation or inhibition of the movement. The recording of eye movements is a very high-performance tool, while its non-invasive, safe, quick and provides objective results even with patients at later stages of diseases.

Recordings of eye movements in patients with Parkinsonian syndromes have become necessary to help with the diagnosis at the onset of the pathology. In general, several abnormalities in eye velocity and in cognitive functions are found. VOG systems with a high frame rate (over 300Hz) are very safe and paradigms testing activation inhibition and smooth pursuit are very useful for neurologists.

Results are so promising for the diagnosis of Parkinsonian disorders that e(ye)BRAIN now conducts clinical studies on multiple sclerosis, in order to check the ability of eye movement tracking in the diagnosing of this pathology as well.

With thanks to labnews uk  | www.labnews.co.uk