Science Headlines for November 25, 2008

Pain And Itch Responses Regulated Separately

Historically, scientists have regarded itching as a less intense version of the body's response to pain, but researchers have now determined that pain and itch actually are regulated by different molecular mechanisms.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

Global Warming Predictions Are Overestimated, Suggests Study On Black Carbon

A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

How Is Our Left Brain Is Different From Our Right?

Scientists found that synaptic size and shape in the center of the spatial memory (i.e. hippocampus) were asymmetrical between synapses receiving input from the left and right hemisphere. Differences were found in the synaptic connections of the learning center of the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

Forests May Play Overlooked Role In Regulating Climate

Scientists show that forests may influence the Earth's climate in important ways that have not previously been recognized.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

Can An Ant Be Employee Of The Month?

Ants specializing on one job such as snatching food from a picnic are no more efficient than "Jane-of-all-trade" ants, according to new research from the University of Arizona in Tucson. The finding casts doubt on the idea that the worldwide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

New Diabetes Treatment? New Source Of Insulin-producing Cells Identified

Researchers have shown that insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells can form after birth or after injury from progenitor cells within the pancreas that were not beta cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 7:00 pm

FoxJ1 Helps Cilia Beat A Path To Asymmetry

Scientists have discovered how a genetic switch, known as FoxJ1, helps developing embryos tell their left from their right. While at first glance the right and left sides of our bodies are identical to each other, this symmetry is only skin-deep. Below the surface, some of our internal organs are shifted sideways -- heart and stomach to the left, liver and appendix to the right.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm

Transporting Broiler Chickens Could Spread Antibiotic-resistant Organisms

Researchers have found evidence of a novel pathway for potential human exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensively raised poultry -- driving behind the trucks transporting broiler chickens from farm to slaughterhouse.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm

Robots Created That Develop And Display Emotions And Become Attached To Certain People

New robots develop and display emotions as they interact with humans, and become attached to them.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm

Old Flies Can Become Young Moms

Female flies can turn back the biological clock and extend their lifespan at the same time, biologists report. Study casts doubt on the old notion of a trade off between reproduction and longevity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm

Turkey Genome to Be Sequenced (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - During this Thanksgiving season, hungry diners won't be the only ones turning their attention to the tasty birds. Scientists plan to use the latest technology to sequence the turkey genome.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 3:03 pm

Turkey Genome to Be Sequenced

Scientists are planning to sequence the genome of the tasty gobbler.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:50 pm

Minister calls for UK space facility

The science minister Lord Drayson called today for a major new space facility to be built in Britain in a speech to the European Space Agency (Esa).

Government officials are drawing up plans for a space centre that will focus on observing climate change from space and developing robotics for future missions. The facility would be based at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

Speaking at the agency's ministerial meeting in the Hague, Lord Drayson said British scientists would receive "a real boost" from a UK-based Esa facility, which would also "enable Esa to make the most of the UK's world-class expertise in environmental change, climate science and robotics".

The British space industry is already worth £5.8 billion a year and supports at least 16,000 jobs, but the government is concerned that too few of Esa's projects are contracted to scientists and engineers in Britain.

Lord Drayson also confirmed Britain's plans to back Esa's flagship environmental monitoring satellite network, GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security Programmes), though he did not elaborate on the level of funding the government is willing to commit.

Climate scientists have written to prime minister Gordon Brown amid concerns that the government is poised to slash the £128m it has already promised for the project.

The GMES network is the world's most ambitious environmental surveillance project, featuring satellites and ground stations to monitor the effects of climate change.

Meanwhile, the toolbox dropped by astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station last week has been filmed from Earth. Stefanyshyn-Piper and fellow astronaut Steve Bowen spent more than seven hours greasing a rotary joint on the station's starboard solar array system last week.

Kuwait's ruler puts cabinet resignation on hold (Reuters)

Reuters - Kuwait's ruler decided to put on hold the resignation of the OPEC country's cabinet on Tuesday, leaving his options open for intervention to end a crippling crisis between the government and parliament.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:38 pm

Blood tests may show inherited diseases in fetuses

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Doctors may soon be able to diagnose inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis, thalassaemia and sickle cell anemia in fetuses by simply testing a blood sample taken from the mother.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:30 pm

NASA finds apparent fix for urine recycling system

HOUSTON (Reuters) - NASA appears to have resolved problems with a new urine recycling system on the International Space Station, bolstering hopes it will be able to expand the research outpost's crew next year, officials at the U.S. space agency said on Tuesday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:29 pm

NASA finds apparent fix for urine recycling system (Reuters)

Reuters - NASA appears to have resolved problems with a new urine recycling system on the International Space Station, bolstering hopes it will be able to expand the research outpost's crew next year, officials at the U.S. space agency said on Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:29 pm

Oiligarchy: A game with a message

Trash the environment for profit to win! An utterly partial guide to the oil industry, as you 'walk a mile' in a mogul's shoes. Naomi Alderman is pushing this link
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:12 pm

Male Lizards Do Push-Ups to Get Attention

When a male anole lizard wants to alert others he does four-legged push-ups.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 25 Nov 2008 | 2:07 pm

Origin of Sex Pinned Down

Scientists find early stage of sex chromosome evolution in strawberry plants.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:51 pm

Finally, urine recycler passes astronauts' test (AP)

AP - After several days without luck, astronauts finally ran a successful test on equipment that turns urine into drinking water a necessity for supporting the international space station's crew, which will soon double.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:49 pm

Lizards attract attention by doing push-ups

Puerto Rican lizards put on elaborate displays of push-ups to grab the attention of others when the forest is noisy, scientists have discovered.

Researchers built robotic lizards that mimicked the animals' movements and found that the eye-catching shows made real lizards pay more attention.

In the wild, Puerto Rican anole lizards perform push-ups before sending out more complex signals by bobbing their heads up and down and unfurling flaps of skin beneath their chins called dewlaps.

Terry Ord at the University of Chicago programmed motorised lizards to imitate the push-ups and head-bobbing displays and attached them to trees in the Puerto Rican forest. After observing more than 300 reactions from nearby lizards, his research team concluded that push-ups are used only when the neighbours are far away or the light is poor.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists say the findings are confirmation of a 30-year-old hypothesis that when the environment is noisy or visually busy, animals use more conspicuous signals to communicate.

"The trouble for an animal that tries to send an information-rich signal under low-light conditions or when the wind is blowing branches and leaves around is that the signal will not transmit very far. To solve that conundrum, the theory goes, you start the communication with a conspicuous component to attract the attention of your receivers," said Ord.

Scientists have documented cases of animals using trills and barks to grab the attention of nearby animals, but this is the first time a mute species has used body language to achieve the same goal, Ord said.

Another Extrasolar Planet Possibly Imaged

Astronomers have taken an infrared snapshot of a possible exoplanet.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:28 pm

Video: Robotic lizard doing push-ups

Watch a robotic lizard attract attention with four-legged press-ups before unfurling its 'dewlaps'
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:27 pm

In Tough Times, Even Amoebas Turn to Family

Single-celled blobs can recognize relatives.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:08 pm

Brazil flood death toll rises to 65, 17 missing (AP)

AP - The death toll from rain-spawned floods and mudslides in southern Brazil has risen to 65 people, with 17 still missing, civil defense authorities said Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:07 pm

Milky Way is 'sweet throughout'

A simple sugar implicated in the origins of life has been found outside the centre of the galaxy for the first time.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:52 pm

Photos reveal Hadrian's history

Archaeologists uncover 2,700 previously unrecorded historic features along the length of Hadrians Wall by studying thousands of aerial pictures.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:39 pm

Vote: Should cannabis be reclassified as a class B drug?

Should cannabis be upgraded from a class C drug to class B?
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:31 pm

Man Soars Across Royal Gorge with Jet Pack

Eric Scott set records for distance, height and speed.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:15 pm

Space Station's Urine Recycler Passes Key Test

After days of glitches, the space station's new urine recycler has passed a key test.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 11:35 am

Bacterial Banquet: What Ocean Algae Eat

Microscopic algae that eat free-floating bacteria in the open ocean.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 11:34 am

Astronaut Invents Zero-G Coffee Cup

Astronaut Don Pettit invents no-straw way to drink coffee in space.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 11:29 am

Wanted: Ideas for Clearing Space Trash

Launchspace is keen on trying to find new ways to battle the bits of space flotsam.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 11:29 am

Spacewalkers Wrap Up Marathon Space Station Repair

Two astronauts finished a marathon four-spacewalk space station fix on Monday.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Nov 2008 | 11:29 am

Some breast cancers may naturally regress: study

LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers who tracked breast cancer rates in Norwegian women proposed the controversial notion on Monday that some tumors found with mammograms might otherwise naturally disappear on their own if left undetected.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 10:49 am

Mardell's Europe

Deal on car industry and green targets still being decided
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 10:27 am

Video: Jetpack pilot flies over gorge in Colorado

Jetpack pilot Eric Scott flies 450 metres over a gorge in Colorado
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 10:14 am

Robo-reptile reveals that press-ups are key to lizard language

A robotic reptile helps to reveal how anole lizards use press-ups to communicate.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 8:37 am

Taiwan hopes for China panda love affair (Reuters)

Reuters - A Taiwan zoo will try to mate a pair of giant pandas from China and may return any cub for tender loving care, a zoo official said on Tuesday, another twist in efforts to improve ties between the two political rivals.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Nov 2008 | 8:10 am

Justin L Barrett: Do children believe because they're told to by adults? The evidence suggests otherwise

Justin L Barrett: Do children believe because they're told to by adults? The evidence suggests otherwise
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 8:00 am

Climate law 'could cost billions'

Government figures show the costs of the Climate Change Bill could far outweigh the benefits, a senior MP argues.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 3:53 am

The Green Room

An MP's warning over the cost of the Climate Change Bill
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 3:23 am

Our space

French minister champions space for the citizens
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 3:20 am

EU condemned on tuna 'mockery'

Environmental groups condemn the new quota for Mediterranean bluefin tuna, saying it is a "mockery of science".
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 1:52 am

Marine life faces 'acid threat'

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least ten times faster than previously thought, a study says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:51 am

Galaxy 'missing link' uncovered

Images from the Hubble telescope and the Galaxy Zoo project prove the prevalence of curiously red-coloured spiral galaxies.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:49 am

The Welllcome Collection: where science and art are encouraged to meet Stuart Jeffries profiles the work of the Wellcome Collection

On the wall of the Wellcome Collection in London is a colour pencil drawing of a man's crotch that makes me wince. It is a self-portrait, featuring a dangling penis, curly thigh hairs and a post-operative scar indicating that the subject has had a testicle removed. It is by Michael Landy, the British artist perhaps best known for his 2001 artwork Breakdown, a performance piece in which he destroyed everything he owned at the old C&A store on Oxford Street.

But it's the title that leaves me open- mouthed. Left-Side Orchidectomy. Beauty and surgical procedure combined in a single discombobulating word. Later, I find myself surfing the Cancer Research UK website to get a sense of what orchidectomies are - which is probably a good thing: men like me don't know where their prostate is, still less that an operation to reduce prostate cancer's impact has such a lovely/hideous name. Anything that helps reduce ignorance is good, isn't it?

The Wellcome Collection is aimed at fulfilling pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome's vision of "a place where people could learn more about the development of medicine through the ages and across cultures" (which sounds off-puttingly worthy), and "where you can consider what it means to be human" (which - at least to me - doesn't ).

Since its new galleries opened last year, the temporary shows have made the Wellcome Collection one of London's more exciting galleries. Its first show was about the human heart. The dull thump of a heartbeat pursued visitors as they explored an exhibition that included Leonardo's dissection drawings, a heart-lung machine and live heart surgery beamed in from Cambridge. It has since put on shows called Sleep and Dreaming, and another called Skeletons: London's Buried Bodies, in which 26 skeletons of Londoners were exhibited, each accompanied by a recent photograph by artist Thomas Adank of the burial site where they were discovered.

Art, then, works with science at the Wellcome Collection, sometimes more or less as its handmaiden. In 1959, the British scientist and novelist CP Snow argued that there had been a communication breakdown between the "two cultures" of modern society - the sciences and the humanities. The Wellcome Collection wants to be a place where that cross-cultural communication can be defibrillated, where artists and scientists might do more than eye each other suspiciously. "The central idea is that medicine and health are too big to be left to scientists," says Ken Arnold, Wellcome's head of public programmes.

The Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, which was established on Sir Henry's death in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. It has an endowment of £15bn, making it the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research - and some of that endowment is used to house Wellcome's collection of medicine-related artefacts and to stage temporary exhibitions, talks, musical evenings. It is even developing a sideline in book publishing.

But what is its USP? Surely artists were considering the human body long before Wellcome? "Absolutely," says Arnold. "There are so many interesting, engaged artists who would be doing what interests us anyway. We either commission them to extend their research or just show what they have been up to."

It was this spring's exhibition, Life Before Death, that put the Wellcome Collection on the map. It was a big thematic show, consisting of portraits of 24 terminally ill people before and after death, all photographed by Walter Schels, an artist terrified of death. Art critics found themselves blindsided by the emotive power of an exhibition that unflinchingly examined our mortality. "We kept finding hard-boiled critics and members of the public crying in the galleries," said curator James Peto.

Gunther von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibition is more likely to make visitors faint than cry, has said his aim was "edutainment", an ugly word that beautifully captured what he is up to. "I want to bring the life back to anatomy," he said. The living could handle a dead man's lungs and resolve, perhaps, not to smoke. The Wellcome Collection doesn't work that way. "We don't have to make shows for the lowest common denominator," says Arnold. "But we do accept the charge that we are about helping people to learn something."

Much of the art in the Wellcome's permanent show Medicine Now is disturbingly educative. But the collection can sometimes find beauty in the most unexpected places. Earlier this year, it put on an exhibition called From Atoms to Patterns, tracing the postwar British tradition of using x-ray photographs of crystalline materials to supply beautiful textile designs.

Despite such delights, the collection has faced several critical brickbats. When its new £30m exhibition spaces opened last year, some critics hated them. They especially disliked Medicine Man, the permanent exhibition showcasing part of Henry Wellcome's collection. "It seems," wrote veteran cassandra Brian Sewell, "a haphazard agglomeration of worthless objects accumulated by a magpie mind that from time to time remembered that its prime interest was medicine."

Arnold says this verdict is unfair. "Wellcome was the last great collector. He didn't collect as a connoisseur but as a research project. That's why he seems incomprehensible to some critics. He had an understanding that humankind has a dominant interest in preserving our health and also in finding out what's inside us."

But surely Sewell has a point? Wellcome collected anything even vaguely related to medicine and some feted items are merely dubious secular relics: Napoleon's toothbrush, Nelson's razor, Florence Nightingale's moccasins and a lock of George III's hair. And some critics have been equally dubious about the Wellcome's temporary shows. For all the popularity of the Sleeping and Dreaming show, Jonathan Jones weighed in with a two-star demolition job in the Guardian that concluded: "I love the idea that art and science can become one, but this exhibition makes me wonder if they are compatible at all."

Now the collection has launched its most ambitious show. Called War and Medicine, it aims to trace the history of this odd couple since the Crimean war. "Apart from anything else," says Peto, "it will ask what is the politics of medicine when it is involved in keeping a war effort going? The biggest problem of warfare is that it keeps away what it is to be humanising - how, you might ask, can medicine be part of that?"

A typically bravura show, put together with the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, it dares to tackle big ideas and to answer troubling, topical questions. It does this through the analysis of medical interventions including the wartime dramas of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, the birth of psychiatry as a response to shellshock in the first world war, and through David Cotterrell's installation, recording how surgical teams operate behind the lines in Afghanistan.

What seems especially striking about the relationship between art and medicine is that, as armies have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of harming their enemies, medicine has had to respond virtuosically to the changes in types of wounded casualties and increases in their number. I didn't really know much about this issue and certainly haven't thought enough about what kind of sick society would organise itself that way. Thanks to the Wellcome Collection, I am once more in serious danger of learning something.

Jim Al-Khalili: Scientists must publicly defend rational, secular society

Jim Al-Khalili: While people still cling to beliefs from the dark ages, more scientists must publicly defend rational, secular society
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:04 am

Unexpected rise in carbon-fuelled ocean acidity threatens shellfish, say scientists

The world's oceans are becoming acidic more quickly than climate change models predict, according to scientists who claim it will have a dramatic impact on marine ecosystems.

Water samples collected around an island in the eastern Pacific over the past eight years showed seawater had acidified more than 20 times faster than scientists expected. The effect could be devastating for shellfish and other crustaceans, because acidic waters dissolve calcium carbonate used by the organisms to make their protective shells.

Oceans absorb about a third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When the gas dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, which alters the ocean's delicate chemical balance.

The increasing acidification of the oceans is likely to have impacts that run throughout the marine ecosystem, because the organisms most affected are at the bottom of the foodchain.

Timothy Wootton, a biologist at the University of Chicago, led a team of researchers who analysed the acidity, salinity and temperature of water around Tatoosh Island off the northwestern coast of Washington state.

Over eight years, the pH level of the water fell by 0.36 to about 8.1, more than 23 times more than the predicted fall of just 0.015 points. Water is neutral if its pH is seven, and becomes more acidic as the pH falls below that.

Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists raise concerns at how rapidly the process is happening and the impact it could have. "Acidification may be a more urgent issue than previously predicted, at least in some areas of the ocean," the authors write.

According to computer models of the local marine life, the rise in acidity is likely to cause substantial falls in the numbers of mussels and large goose barnacles, while algae and populations of smaller barnacles may increase. In turn, the changing distribution of these organisms will have effects on marine life that feed on them.

Last month, researchers warned that a new global deal on climate change would come too late to save many of the world's corals. A report from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California found that carbon dioxide emissions are likely to acidify seawater enough to cause widespread damage to major reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Even stringent cuts designed to stabilise greenhouse gas levels still put more than 90% of the world's reefs in jeopardy.

"Declines in seawater pH were expected to happen very slowly, so we've been lax in dealing with the problem, but our study shows ocean acidification may be happening much quicker," said Wootton.

Galaxies Discovered in Their Awkward Teen Phase

A newly discovered class of galaxies could represent the awkward teenage phase of galaxy evolution, providing a bridge between the two most common types of galaxies.

Most galaxies are either blue spiral galaxies (left column in image) like the Milky Way or Andromeda, and red elliptical galaxies (right column) shaped more like a football than pinwheel. The former are generally thought of as the rambunctious young 'uns, while the latter are more like staid old fogeys.

But now astronomers have spotted some red spiral galaxies (middle column) that could be the missing link between the two classes.

Because blue stars are generally younger and hotter, while red stars tend to be older and cooler, most bluish spiral galaxies are thought to be young compared to the reddish ellipticals. Astronomers think the spirals are undergoing an active bout of star formation, with lots of newly born, blue stars giving the galaxies their hue.

The newfound red spiral galaxies, spotted by scientists from the Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey and the Galaxy Zoo project could represent a transition point between the two main types of galaxies. The discovery will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"In order to have spiral arms, they must have been normal, blue, spiral galaxies up until fairly recently," Steven Bamford, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham in England, said in a press release. "But for some reason their star formation has been stopped, and they have turned red. Whatever caused them to stop forming stars can't have been particularly violent, or it would have destroyed the delicate spiral pattern."

The red spirals tend to be found near locations crowded with other galaxies, and the scientists suspect their environment may play a role in slowing down star formation in these galaxies. But more research is needed to find out exactly what shuts off this process.

A galaxy's mass also affects how it transitions to old age. The red spirals tend to be more massive galaxies, and the scientists suggest that smaller galaxies can't retain their spiral arms for long after star formation shuts down, and transform more quickly into smooth, lens-shaped galaxies. To complete the changeover into full-blown ellipticals, a violent event such as a collision between galaxies is probably also needed.

"Just as a heavyweight fighter can withstand a blow that would bring a normal person to his knees, a big galaxy is more resistant to being messed around by its local environment," said Galaxy Zoo team member Bob Nichol of England's University of Portsmouth in a press release. "Therefore, the red spirals that we see tend to be the larger galaxies — presumably because the smaller ones are transformed more quickly."

See Also:

Image: Marco Barden, Christian Wolf, Meghan Gray, the STAGES survey / Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 25 Nov 2008 | 12:02 am

Synthetic Viruses Could Explain Animal-to-Human Jumps

In a technical tour de force with potentially profound implications for the study of emerging diseases, researchers have built the largest-ever self-replicating organism from scratch.

The organism is a virus based on genome sequences taken from a bat-borne version of SARS, a lethal respiratory disease that jumped from animals to humans in 2002. The synthetic virus could help explain how SARS evolved, and the same approach could be used to investigate other species-hopping killers.

"This gives us a system to more quickly answer the questions of where a virus came from, of how to develop vaccines and treatments for a brand-new virus that leaps to humans like SARS did," said Vanderbilt University microbiologist Mark Denison.

Just a decade ago, artificially constructed viruses seemed like science fiction. But the field of synthetic biology has progressed with extraordinary rapidity. Six years ago, polio became the first virus to be synthesized. Three years ago, biologists reconstructed an influenza strain from the 1918 epidemic, in the process discovering what made it so lethal. The synthetic SARS virus is even more complicated than either of those creations. And as such research has progressed, concerns have intensified over viruses jumping from animals to people, then spreading rapidly through a globalized world of international travel and migration.

In some cases, scientists might — as with SARS — suspect the identity of the original animal virus, but not understand the murky process by which it became infectious in humans. In other cases, they might want to know what is needed for an existing animal virus to enter people. But it's not always easy to study viruses: many are impossible to grow in a lab, or known from just a few wild samples. That's when synthetic viruses could be useful.

"It can be very hard to study where a virus originally came from," said Denison. "If you start from where you think the virus was, and let the virus tell you where it's going, then you learn a tremendous amount about viral evolution and movement."

In the case of SARS, which killed nearly 800 people before being contained, scientists think it came from bats, but have been unable to keep the bat version alive in laboratory cell cultures.

Denison's team used the genetic sequence of bat SARS to build the virus. Bat SARS doesn't normally infect people, but the researchers added a critical tweak: a gene present only in the human version of the virus. The new version flourished in human cell cultures, suggesting that a mutation in the gene, known as Bat-SRBD, was responsible for SARS' lethal spread.

The new virus did not kill mice, however. Other genetic differences between the synthetic and natural strains can now be studied to learn what makes SARS so virulent, said Denison, and the technique applied to other viruses similar to SARS. These include the Ebola, Hanta, Nipah and Chikunguya viruses, all of which originated in animals and are lethal to people.

"You could get to a point where, within a couple weeks of an epidemic being identified, you've already grown and generated viruses for the study of immune response," said Denison.

Whether the technique is useful elsewhere remains be seen, but "there's a good possibility" that it will, said Peter Palese, a Mount Sinai Medical Center microbiologist. Palese edited the paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but was not involved in the research itself.

Even if it's experimental, he said, researchers need to try.

"If we were successful with conventional approaches," said Palese, "then they would have worked already."

Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice [PNAS]

Image: Synthetic SARS virus (tagged with fluorescent green protein) growing in mouse respiratory tissue / PNAS

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Nov 2008 | 10:56 pm

Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog

Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips |