T cell's memory may offer long-term immunity to leishmaniasis
... is a parasitic disease spread by the bite of sand flies infected with the protozoan Leishmania. While the disease is most common in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, it has been recently been seen in United States military personnel who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. A...New technique targets pesticide-resistant insects
...ials in southern Spain with highly resistant white flies (Bemisia tabaci)." Since resistance to pesticides first emerged in insect pests, more than 500 species of insects and mites have developed tolerance to chemicals 3 including pesticides regarded as being environmentally benign. Dr Robin Gunning sa...Flies have morning and evening clocks
...long sought dual body clocks in the brain of fruit flies that separately govern bursts of morning and eveni...ting it back together." Biological clocks in both flies and humans operate on a 24-hour, or circadian (Latin for "about a day"), cycle. In humans, the clock...Using fruitflies to examine alcohol tolerance
...Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research uses flies to define the genetic and mechanistic underpinning...ol, cocaine, PCP, and nicotine. The popularity of flies as a model system is in large part due to the availability of powerful genetic tools that enable the...Multi-species herbivore outbreak follows El Nio drought in Panama
... under control quickly by hungry birds, parasitoid flies and wasps, and aggressive caterpillar diseases. Climatologists predict that ENSO events will become more common as global temperatures rise. And because herbivores hit some tree species harder than others, repeated herbivore outbreaks could change t...Discovery might improve design, effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs
...ent from the fact that this protein 'water bottle' flies for many seconds through a nearly perfect vacuum into which the water molecule would evaporate instantly if it were exposed to the surroundings." Inside the mass spectrometer manufactured by Bruker Daltronics, Inc., the vacuum was comparable to the v...Nitric oxide is essential for animal development
...development in the fruit fly, Drosophila, and that flies lacking the gene die as embryos. The work takes advantage of the fact that, unlike those of mammals, the genome of the fruit fly has only one NOS gene and is thus more amenable to mutagenesis and genetic analysis. After a large genetic screen, the re...Are museum collections of ancient life representative?
... Maybe the curator just looked for T-rex teeth and flies in amber. Susan Barbour Wood of Stuart, Va., a Ph.D. student in geosciences at Virginia Tech, compared the biodiversity of the mollusk collection from the Chesapeake region at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville with bulk samples ...New gene target found for common brain tumors in children
...ell growth and survival, has been studied in fruit flies for almost a century. The research team at the Johns Hopkins Pathology Department and Kimmel Cancer Center found that a protein made by the Notch2 gene promotes cancer cell growth by 27 percent in a childhood brain tumor, called medulloblastoma. Th...'Blind' cells see the light; maybe someday humans will, too
...ting material the potassium channel found in fruit flies -- so that, when expressed in a cell, the channel is broken and always stays open. They also added an extra molecule -- the amino acid cysteine -- to the channel protein so that, once the protein gets in place in the cell membrane, this molecule dang......niversity have discovered a gene mutation in fruit flies that alters sensitivity to crack cocaine and also ...f the Drosophila LIM-only (Lmo) gene. Normal fruit flies increase their activity when exposed to low doses of crack cocaine over a one-minute period. At medi...University of Texas at Austin researchers identify drug-tolerance mechanism in flies
...in found on the surface of nerve cells makes fruit flies tolerant to a drug after just a single, brief expo... determined this by studying the response of fruit flies (Drosophila) to a 15-minute exposure to benzyl alcohol coated on the inner walls of test tubes. Flie...Alcohol vulnerability linked to action of insulin
Drunken fruit flies have led to the discovery that insulin may determi...on of insulin-like molecules in the brain of fruit flies is reduced, the intoxicating effect of alcohol increases. Earlier research has demonstrated that the...Loss of fruit fly retina protein delays blinding light damage
...een poorly understood. In the Hopkins experiments, flies whose light-detecting protein rhodopsin was engine...f the eye. The measured signals get smaller as the flies lose their ability to see. The researchers used the electroretinogram on normal fruit flies and foun......ntification of a mutant strain of Drosophila fruit flies with "notched" wings in Thomas Hunt Morgan's lab in 1910. Later studies revealed that the Notch gene encodes a receptor protein that extends through both sides of the cell membrane and which is capable of interacting with a ligand partner, such as th...An invasion of cheats: The evolution of worthless nuptial gifts
...i.e., edible) nuptial gift that male empidid dance flies normally provide their female partner and replaced the gift with either a large edible gift or an inedible cotton ball token that resembles tokens given by other empidid fly species. The researchers found that although pairs copulated longest after p...Researchers find how protein allows insects to detect and respond to pheromones
... Smith's research group found that an OBP in fruit flies called LUSH is required for olfactory neurons to s...e pheromone 11-cis vaccenyl acetate, or VA. Mutant flies lacking the gene that codes for the LUSH protein are unable to detect the VA pheromone and do not di...Powerful X-ray beams at Argonne, new electronic flight simulator
Watching flies fly may not seem like high-tech science, but for r...e APS and a "virtual-reality flight simulator" for flies (designed by collaborator Michael Dickinson of Caltech) to probe to the muscles in a flying fruit fl...Why do some people get bitten by mosquitoes more than others?
...ssor John Pickett, which showed that the number of flies on a herd depended on certain cows being present. ...ividuals were moved to another field the number of flies afflicting the herd increased. James, working in collaboration with Professor Jenny Mordue at the U......ity, it may be possible to identify genes in fruit flies that can be used to treat problems in people, such as sleep disorders and jet lag....