Increased appetite and insulin resistance can be transferred from one mouse to another via intestinal bacteria, according to research being published online by Science magazine. The finding strengthens the case that intestinal bacteria can contribute to human obesity and metabolic disease, since previous research has shown that intestinal bacterial populations differ between obese and lean humans.

The Norwegian dairy company TINE is now planning an in-depth study that will find out whether household bacteria can be used for their own sake. When the Norwegian dairy company TINE makes cheese, it deliberately adds certain organisms to the raw milk. Others get there by chance and shape the end-product. But such games of chance will soon be a thing of the past.

Now, engineers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have sped up the process of analyzing bacterial concentrations to under one hour, through the development of a new in-field, rapid-detection method.Since bacteria levels can change quickly in the water column, a one-day turnaround time simply isn't fast enough to adequately protect swimmers or prevent unnecessary beach closures, the engineers say.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have provided the first experimental evidence that shows that evolution is driven most powerfully by interactions between species, rather than adaptation to the environment.

Mosquitoes -- not birds as suspected -- may have a played a primary role in spreading West Nile virus westward across the United States, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study is among the first to examine the role of mosquitoes in the dispersion of West Nile virus across the U.S. and is published in the March 2 edition of Molecular Ecology.

A team of biologists has unraveled the biochemistry of how bacteria so precisely time cell division, a key element in understanding how all organisms from bacteria to humans use their biological clocks to control basic cellular functions.

A common bacteria found in many healthy adult females that can cause life-threatening infections when passed to newborns could be introduced to some women through frequent contact with cows, according to a research team led by a Michigan State University pediatrician. The recently published findings that Group B streptococcus could be a zoonotic disease -- transmitted between different species -- may have significant public health implications, said Dele Davies, chairperson of MSU's Department of Pediatrics and Human Development.

Oncogenic retroviruses are a particular family of viruses that can cause some types of cancer. Thierry Heidmann and his colleagues in the CNRS-Institut Gustave Roussy-Universite Paris Sud 11 "Rétrovirus endogènes et elements retroides des eucaryotes superieurs" Laboratory have studied these viruses. They have identified a "virulence factor" that inhibits the host immune response and allows the virus to spread throughout the body. This factor is a sequence of amino acids that is located in the envelope protein of the virus.

Vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, has long been a model system for studying and understanding the life cycle of negative-strand RNA viruses, which include viruses that cause influenza, measles and rabies. More importantly, research has shown that VSV has the potential to be genetically modified to serve as an anti-cancer agent, exercising high selectivity in killing cancer cells while sparing healthy cells, and as a potent vaccine against HIV.