Legionnaire’s disease bacteria tap into the material transport in immune cells. When it infects the lungs, the Legionnaire’s bacterium Legionella pneumophila causes acute pneumonia. The pathogen’s modus operandi is particularly ingenious: it infiltrates deliberately into cells of the human immune system and injects a host of proteins which then interfere in the normal cellular processes. [...]
Archive for the ‘Agriculture’ Category
Hijacked Supplies for Pathogens: Legionnaire’s Disease Bacteria Tap Into the Material Transport in Immune Cells
July 26th, 2010 New Research on Rapidly-Disappearing Ancient Plant Offers Hope for Species Recovery
July 16th, 2010 Cycads, “living fossil” descendents of the first plants that colonized land and reproduced with seeds, are rapidly going extinct because of invasive pests and habitat loss, especially those species endemic to islands. But new research on Cycas micronesica published recently as the cover article in Molecular Ecology calls into question the characterization of these plants [...]
Incidence of Malaria Jumps When Amazon Forests Are Cut, Study Finds
June 17th, 2010 Now, however, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing in the current (June 16, 2010) online issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, presents the most enumerated case to date linking increased incidence of malaria to land-use practices in the Amazon. The report, which combines detailed information on the incidence of malaria [...]
Climate Change Threatens Food Supply of 60 Million People in Asia
June 17th, 2010 According to an article by three Utrecht University researchers published in the journal Science on 11 June, climate change will drastically reduce the discharge of snow and ice meltwater in a region of the Himalayas, threatening the food security of more than 60 million people in Asia in the coming decades. The Indus and Brahmaputra basins [...]
Wild Potato Germplasm Holds Key to Disease Resistance
June 16th, 2010 Wild potato germplasm that offers resistance to some major potato diseases has been identified by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists. Geneticists Dennis Halterman and Shelley Jansky pinpointed the resistant wild potato species in studies at the ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wis. Halterman has identified a wild potato species called Solanum verrucosum that contains [...]
Yellow Fever Vaccine Modified to Fight Malaria
June 15th, 2010 There is no vaccine for malaria, which sickens almost a quarter of a billion people each year and kills a child every 30 seconds. That could be changing: researchers at The Rockefeller University have genetically transformed the yellow fever vaccine to prime the immune system to fend off the mosquito borne parasites that cause the [...]
Frogs, Foam and Fuel: Solar Energy Converted to Sugars
March 18th, 2010 For decades, farmers have been trying to find ways to get more energy out of the sun. In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet [...]
Posted in Agriculture, Animals, Solar System, Space 
Tags: Frogs Foam and Fuel, Solar Energy, Solar Energy Converted to Sugars 
Comments OffDiscovery in Legumes Could Reduce Fertilizer Use!
March 15th, 2010 Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer. Excess nitrogen from fertilizer runoff into rivers and lakes causes algal blooms that create oxygen-depleted dead zones, such as the 6,000 to 7,000 square mile zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and [...]
Posted in Agriculture, Flora & fauna Tags: agriculture news, discovery in legumes, Fertilizer Use in plants, use of less Fertilizer Use Comments Off