Dr. Montelaro and his colleagues found that a particular sequence of amino acids on the tail end of HIV allow the virus to "punch into" and infect cells. The team manufactured a synthetic and more efficient version of this sequence -- called engineered cationic antimicrobial peptides, or "eCAPs" -- that laboratory tests have shown to rapidly destroy bacteria that are otherwise resistant to most standard antibiotics.

Traditional antibiotics typically work by poisoning important metabolic processes after being taken up by the target bacteria, a process that may take hours, or days, to clear a bacterial infection. In contrast, the eCAPs are specifically attracted to the surface of target bacteria where they disrupt the bacterial membrane, causing death within seconds, or minutes.

eCAPs work well against biofilms

the patch conducts electricity at about the same speed as natural heart cells and it "squeezes" appropriately

closest man-made approximation of native human heart tissue to date

Scientists believe that disruption of two key particles—and consequently a proteasome's ability to work correctly—has implications for cancers as well as various neurological degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.

"In the assembly process there is only one tail that actually determines how the core particle and regulatory particle bind together," Roelofs said. "That's surprising because there are six tails, but only one is needed to give specificity, and the docking into the pocket is controlled by the chaperone."

the findings may reveal new targets for anticancer drugs

The growing resistance of pathogenic microorganisms against antimicrobial agents has generated a search for alternative treatments for localized infections.

In this study we have demonstrated that it is possible to rapidly photoinactivate S. aureus when present in a burn wound with PTMPP as PS

susceptibilities of the multiple-drug resistant strain of S. aureus to deuteroporphyrin and to hemin were tested. The effect of the addition of porphyrins, separately and together, to a logarithmic culture was determined from the viable count of S. aureus over an 8 h period.

This work confirmed that a deuteroporphyrin-hemin complex is a potent killer of a multiple-antibiotic resistant S. aureus in culture

This complex was able to reduce the number of bacteria by six orders of magnitude within 8 h. By using this complex, which is light independent, we have overcome the problem of light penetration to the subeschar space.

When infected with the bacteria Wolbachia, mosquitoes are unable to spread viruses such as dengue

by introducing an insecticide resistance gene alongside the Wolbachia bacteria into the mosquito, that the insects pass on the disease-blocking bacteria to other mosquitoes faster

Our results show that Wolbachia-based strategies could hold the key to a cheap and sustainable approach to disease control

"The human isolates, but not the avian and environmental ones, have a protein mutation that allows for efficient growth in human cells and that also allows them to grow at a temperature that corresponds to the upper respiratory tract of humans, which is lower than you find in birds,