Global efforts to eradicate malaria are crucially dependent on scientists’ ability to outsmart the malaria parasite. And Plasmodium falciparum is notoriously clever: it is quick to develop resistance against medications and has such a complex life cycle that blocking it effectively with a vaccine has thus far proved elusive. In a new study reported in Nature Communications, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, together with collaborators in Ireland and Australia, have shown that P. falciparum is even more devious than previously thought: not only does it hide from the body’s immune defenses, it employs an active strategy to deceive the immune system.
December 07, 2017
Around 15,000 years ago, the Natufian culture appeared in what is today’s Middle East. This culture, which straddled the border between nomadic and settled lifestyles, had diverse, complex origins – much more than researchers had assumed. This finding arises from new research by a team of scientists and archaeologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Copenhagen.
December 06, 2017
Scientists from Israel and abroad have designed microscopic silk capsules that can serve as a protective environment for the transport of fragile protein “cargo” for cosmetic, food and pharmaceutical applications — particularly the delivery of drugs within the body. The collaborative research, performed by an international team of academics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK; and the ETH in Switzerland, was reported in Nature Communications on July 19.
December 05, 2017
Weizmann’s Dr. Elisabetta Boaretto, using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, and colleagues from Copenhagen found that the “15,000-year-old ‘Natufian Culture’” could live in zones previously thought to be either uninhabitable or only sparsely populated.
December 05, 2017
The Israeli crystallographer, who shared the chemistry Nobel with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz in 2009 for her work on ribosome, was delivering the 79th Foundation Day lecture on “Next Generation Environmental Friendly Antibiotics” at Bose Institute on Thursday. “Resistance to antibiotics is a real big problem to modern medicine. Multi-drug resistance has developed not because we use antibiotics, but because bacteria has evolved and uses mechanisms against other bacteria in their fight for resources,” Yonath said.
December 01, 2017
