Posted by Zebedee under blog's category : Research & medical benefits

It's 30 years since the first cases of HIV infection. During this time, says the website HIVaware, we've seen rapid change. The life-saving advances in treatment mean that a diagnosis of HIV infection is no longer death sentence. Learn more about how anti-retroviral treatments, based on decades of research into animal retroviruses, have saved millions of lives over two decades.

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Posted by Kite and Zebedee under blog's category : Research & medical benefits

Laboratory mice are so inbred they have portions of genome with no variety at all. To discover much more about what genes do, new wild strains are being introduced into the laboratory.

The Collaborative Cross project started in 2005 with five classic inbreds strains of mice and three more recently developed wild-derived strains. It began to breed them and their offspring together, to reshuffle their genes with the aim of creating hundreds more mouse varieties with a greater genetic diversity.

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Posted by Armadillo under blog's category : Research & medical benefits

Until now rats have trailed behind mice in terms of numbers used, and the gap has been getting ever wider due to the boom in the use of genetically modified mice. But this could all change thanks to recent innovations in genetic techniques on rats.

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Posted by Armadillo under blog's category : Research & medical benefits

Smoking or drinking while pregnant can damage the unborn child. Toxic chemicals such as alcohol, nicotine and carbon monoxide enter the mother's bloodstream and then pass through the umbilical cord to the growing baby. But less obvious are the effects of the mother's lifestyle choices on a baby before it is even conceived.

So far, there is no clear advice about how we can live to reduce health risks to the next generation, but no doubt in another decade or so it won't just be cigarettes and alcohol that are on the banned list.

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