Nature's secrets yield new adhesive material
...dry conditions. As Lee noted, the next research hurdle was whether their hybrid geckel nanoadhesive would continue to stick to surfaces after multiple contacts. This has been a major challenge with other gecko-based adhesives. They typically stick well at first but lose their ability to adhere after a...New amfAR research grants to optimize HIV treatment
...une system or antiretroviral therapy, is the major hurdle that needs to be overcome in order to cure HIV infection. Scientists believe the reservoir is established during acute infection and so the most effective interventions aimed at eradicating it might have to be applied very early during infection. Dr....JCI table of contents: June 14, 2007
...es throughout pregnancy are not well understood. A hurdle to expanding our knowledge of the effects of progesterone is the fact that progesterone-deficient mice cannot produce offspring. However, as FKBP52 is a molecule that acts to optimize signaling through the progesterone receptor, Fkbp52-/- mice provid...From ink to optics, study of particle mixtures yields fundamental insights
...earch associate Antti-Pekka Hynninen overcame this hurdle by realizing that they could accurately represent the system with just one to four colloidal particles and their oppositely charged counterparts, called counterions. Their result -- a complete phase diagram that is correct even when the particles ha...BCM, Rice make major advance in structural biology
...es started to fall into place for Poon, but a huge hurdle remained the protein Ma and Poon were using as a test case had to be "fitted" to the map that Poon's program had produced. This final step is like an enormous puzzle, and to solve it, students put on special goggles that allow them to look at a comp...Low-energy LED lighting project is streets ahead
...of a bird nesting over a vital heatsink. Another hurdle will be the regulations that govern things like glare and light pollution, and engineers say that directing LED light sources onto the required area will be a challenge. The one-year project has been funded with a 175,000 grant from the Department ...Cells selectively absorb short nanotubes
...or advanced technology applications. A significant hurdle in outlining the parameters contributing to nanotube toxicity is to prepare well-defined and characterized nanotube samples, as they typically contain a distribution of lengths, diameters, twists and impurities. The team chose to isolate the effect...Ultrathin films deliver DNA as possible gene therapy tool
...not yet a viable therapeutic method. One sizeable hurdle is getting the right genes into the right place at the right time. Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now developing a tool to tackle this problem. David M. Lynn and his colleagues have created ultrathin, nanoscale films composed ...Scientists genetically engineer tomatoes with enhanced folate content
...fected by this alteration." And there is another hurdle the researchers must clear. Boosting the production of folate in tomatoes involved increasing the level of another chemical in the plant, pteridine. Little is known about this chemical, which is found in virtually all fruits and vegetables. ...New hope for regenerative medicine
... uniparental ES cell research faces the biological hurdle of genomic imprinting, in which specific gene expression patterns are dictated by the parental origin. Uniparental cells only have the imprinting marks for one parental type (or "from one parent") with unknown consequences if harvested and transplant...Scientists clone mice from adult skin stem cells
...ucleus from these adult skin stem cells. A main hurdle in nuclear transfer with adult cells has been its efficiency out of a hundred attempts, only a handful may succeed with reported success rates never reaching into double digits. "The efficiency of nuclear transfer is very low," says Li. "Using puri...Study finds flaws in cancer clinical trials
...three-drug combination has to meet that 30 percent hurdle and jump over it, Vickers said. "So we have to be pretty certain that the 30 percent target is correct," he said. Of the 70 studies they examined, however, nearly half (46 percent) did not give any justification for the historical target. And of th...New culture method for hepatitis C virus uses primary hepatocytes and patient serum
... of Washington School of Medicine has crossed this hurdle using a human fetal hepatocyte culture system that was previously developed in his lab. Using this system, his group has demonstrated sustained replication and production of virus particles for at least 2 months, with these virus particles able to in...Gene therapy for muscular dystrophy fixes frail muscle cells in animal model, Stanford study finds
...al different techniques with variable success. One hurdle is getting genes into muscle cells all over the body. Another is convincing those cells to permanently produce the therapeutic protein made by those genes. The gene therapy technique Rando and postdoctoral fellow Carmen Bertoni, PhD, used was develo...Engineered stem cells show promise for sneaking drugs into the brain
... in laboratory animals for up to three months. One hurdle that needs to be overcome before such a technique could be attempted in human patients, says Svendsen, is developing a method to switch transplanted cells on or off and thus control their drug delivery capabilities. Working with engineered cells in c...JCI table of contents November, 2005
...ailability of such tissue has been a long-standing hurdle for the study of these diseases. This work contributes to our understanding of the events leading to the activation of autoreactive B cells in patients with SLE. TITLE: Germinal center exclusion of autoreactive B cells is defective in human system...Researchers devise new technique for creating human stem cells
...c state." Melton said that the remaining technical hurdle is figuring out a way to eliminate the embryonic stem cell nucleus in the hybrid cell, causing it to have a normal number of chromosomes. One problem, said Melton, is that the nucleus in stem cells is large, occupying nearly the entire cell. Thus, it...JCI table of contents, July 1, 2005
...apy holds promise for restoring fertility, a major hurdle has been the risk of contamination by leukemic cells, which may induce relapse. Now, in a study appearing online on June 16 in advance of print publication in the July 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Akira Tsujimura and colleagues f...Biomarkers isolated from saliva successfully predict oral and breast cancer
...n and pancreatic cancers. "In my mind the biggest hurdle stems from the fact that salivary nucleic acids or protein markers might be influenced by eating, drinking, smoking, diet or oral hygiene," said Wong. "So our goal is to provide the optimized and standardized protocol to assure consistent results." T......ying termite guts one place in nature where a key hurdle for carbon-neutral energy supply has already been solved. Termite guts take indigestible cellulose, which makes up the bulk of all plant material grown on earth, and convert it to ethanol, which even today is a versatile and popular fuel. Chu describ...