Eating air, making fuel

27-Jun-2016 - All life on the planet relies, in one way or another, on a process called carbon fixation: the ability of plants, algae and certain bacteria to "pump" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment, add solar or other energy and turn it into the sugars that are the required starting point needed for ...

Making the most of a shitty situation

What the “fecal prints” of microbes can tell us about Earth’s evolution

02-Jan-2015 - Everything that eats must excrete, and microbes are no exception. Microbes have dominated the Earth’s ecology for at least the past 3.5 billion years. They play a vital role in the planet’s carbon cycle by digesting organic matter. So their waste potentially carries information about how the ...

Tokyo Institute of Technology research: Towards medical treatments using cell level control

06-Nov-2012 - Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science identify a means of controlling biological processes that could help treatments for immune disease, neurological disorders and cancer.The cellular response to a number of signals including inflammatory cytokines, ...

Gut microbes battle a common set of viruses shared by global populations

26-Jun-2012 - The human gut is home to a teeming ecosystem of microbes that is intimately involved in both human health and disease. But while the gut microbiota is interacting with our body, they are also under constant attack from viruses. In a study published in Genome Research, researchers have analyzed ...

How cells brace themselves for starvation

24-Feb-2012 - Sugar, cholesterol, phosphates, zinc – a healthy body is amazingly good at keeping such vital nutrients at appropriate levels within its cells. From an engineering point of view, one all-purpose model of pump on the surface of a cell should suffice to keep these levels constant: When the ...

Abbott to Fund Pharmaceutical and Diagnostics Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science

30-Jun-2011 - Abbott and Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS), have signed a three-year agreement in which Abbott will fund research programs at the Weizmann Institute of Science in selected health care fields.The collaboration will explore ...

Raptor Pharmaceutical Licenses Intellectual Property Related to Huntington's Disease

04-Jun-2010 - Raptor Pharmaceutical Corp. announced that the Company has acquired an exclusive worldwide license to intellectual property related to the potential treatment of Huntington's Disease from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Niigata University in Japan. In addition, Raptor has added ...

Antibiotics might team up to fight deadly staph infections

29-Jan-2010 - Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Israel's Weizman Institute of Science have found that two antibiotics working together might be more effective in fighting pathogenic bacteria than either drug on its own. Individually, lankacidin and lankamycin, two antibiotics produced ...

The Pink Gene

18-Jan-2010 - What makes a particular variety of tomato pink? The gene responsible, discovered recently at the Weizmann Institute, may help researchers develop new exotic tomatoes. Far Eastern diners are partial to a variety of sweet, pink-skinned tomato. Dr. Asaph Aharoni of the Weizmann Institute's Plant ...

DNA Computation Gets Logical at the Weizmann Institute of Science

The world's smallest computers, made of DNA and other biological molecules, just got more "user friendly" thanks to research at the Weizmann Institute of Science

04-Aug-2009 - Biomolecular computers, made of DNA and other biological molecules, only exist today in a few specialized labs, remote from the regular computer user. Nonetheless, Tom Ran and Shai Kaplan, research students in the lab of Prof. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute's Biological Chemistry, and ...