The man who helped to first sequence the human genome ten years ago, is looking to use biology to tackle the energy problem.

 Using just four hairs and a few small fragments of bone from an ancient man discovered in the permafrost of western Greenland, a research team from the University of Copenhagen have sequenced about 80% of the ancient man's genome. 

Researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville are unlocking some of the secrets that allow bacteria to respond and adapt to changes in their environment - and hope their findings may be used to enhance medicines that fight harmful bacteria or even to develop ways to better utilize bacteria in agriculture and other similar applications.

Biomedical engineers from Boston University have developed a new sequencing technique that eliminates the time-consuming, and often error-prone step of DNA amplification - which will make future genome sequencing both faster and less expensive than any current technologies.

Even small errors made by cells during protein production can have profound disease effects, and nature has developed ways to uncover these mistakes and correct them. Though in the case of one essential protein building block—the amino acid alanine—nature has been extra careful, developing not one, but two checkpoints in her effort to make sure that this component is used correctly.

Finding and treating a tumor without disturbing normal tissue presents challenges -- sometimes the most effective therapies can be invasive and harsh.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have devised a way they might deliver the right therapy directly to tumors using special molecules, called aptamers, which specifically bind to living tumor tissue.

A research team at the Sahlgrenska Academy, in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, have identified the gene that causes a slow-growing but deadly form of glandular cancer known as adenoid cystic carcinoma. Known as a fusion gene - the newly discovered gene is formed when two healthy genes join together as a result of a chromosome change.

Today, three U.S. researchers were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Australian-American researcher Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, won the prize for their discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the role of an enzyme called telomerase in maintaining or stripping away this molecular shield.

The recent emergence and global spread of a new swine flu virus highlights the need for a reliable diagnostic test that can discriminate the H1N1 influenza virus from other strains and can be readily implemented in clinical testing laboratories.

Ultrafast, light-sensitive video cameras are needed for observing high-speed events such as shockwaves, communication between living cells, neural activity, laser surgery and elements of blood analysis. To catch such elusive moments, a camera must be able to capture millions or billions of images continuously with a very high frame rate. Conventional cameras are simply not up to the task.