Scientists attending a recent American Society for Microbiology meeting revealed that bacteria containing a gene known as mcr-1 – which confers resistance to the antibiotic colistin – had spread round the world at an alarming rate since its original discovery 18 months earlier.
Two teams of researchers have used advanced DNA sequencing methods to analyze the 52,000-year-old remains of a Neanderthal woman from Vindija Cave in Croatia, and the 34,000-year-old remains of four anatomically modern humans from the Upper Paleolithic archaeological site of Sunghir.
Sixty years ago, a team of scientists went looking for yellow fever in the jungles that line the northwestern edge of Lake Victoria. What they found instead, in the blood of a rhesus monkey, was a new virus, one they named for the area’s dense vegetation: Uganda’s Zika Forest.
Ten years ago, leaders in the field of toxicology called for a transformation of the discipline to incorporate advances in biotechnology and predictive methodologies into alternative testing strategies. But a decade later, the outcomes of these efforts are not well understood.
In research that potentially could delay the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases of aging, biologists have produced a genetic one-two punch that significantly slowed aging and improved health in the middle-aged fruit flies they studied.
In a study analyzing the genomes of 210,000 people in the United States and Britain, researchers have found that the genetic variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease and heavy smoking are less frequent in people with longer lifespans, suggesting that natural selection is weeding out these unfavorable variants in both populations.