A team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) scientists has developed a new microfluidic tool for quickly and accurately isolating neutrophils -- the most abundant type of white blood cell -- from small blood samples, an accomplishment that could provide information essential to better understanding the immune system's response to traumatic injury.

Much like snowflakes, no two neurons are exactly alike. But it's not the size or shape that sets one neuron apart from another, it's the way it responds to incoming stimuli. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that this diversity is critical to overall brain function and essential in how neurons process complex stimuli and code information.

After more than a decade of research, Scripps Research Institute scientists have pieced together the structure of a human adenovirus -- the largest complex ever determined at atomic resolution. The new findings about the virus, which causes respiratory, eye, and gastrointestinal infections, may lead to more effective gene therapy and to new anti-viral drugs.

A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans. The results, from an early phase clinical trial with 10 patients, are published in the August 25th, 2010 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

Pathogens make themselves feel at home in the human body, invading cells and living off the plentiful amenities on offer. However, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin, together with colleagues at Harvard University, reveal an opposite strategy used to ensure infection success.

The extent to which vitamin D deficiency may increase susceptibility to a wide range of diseases is dramatically highlighted in newly published research. Scientists have mapped the points at which vitamin D interacts with our DNA -- and identified over two hundred genes that it directly influences

A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has provided concrete evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process sensory information such as sound, touch and vision differently than typically developing children.

Together with colleagues from an international research group, autism researcher Christopher Gillberg of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has found in a new study that autism can be partially explained by abnormalities in certain genes.

Researchers at the RIKEN Plant Science Center have illuminated mechanisms underlying the genetic robustness of metabolic effects in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Their findings, reported in Molecular Biology and Evolution, reveal a key balance between the roles played by duplicate genes and metabolic network connectivity in functional compensation.

Researchers at the Tufts University School of Engineering and Boston University have fabricated and characterized the first large area metamaterial structures patterned on implantable, bio-compatible silk substrates.