| |
| News Around World |
| |
Zimbabwe has announced a national emergency over the outbreak of cholera in the country that has claimed 560 lives. The nation¡¯s healthcare system which is ill-prepared to cope with the epidemic due to economic meltdown is in dire need for medical and food supplies to help ease the outbreak. The appeal hope to ease morbidity and mortality due to the current socioeconomic environment. |
| A landmark ruling in Europe¡¯s top human rights court made it clear that it would be a breach in civil rights to store DNA of people with no criminal records. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that under the Human Rights Convention, the collection and storage of one million people¡¯s DNA data in Britain is in direct violation of people¡¯s right to private life. Britain has the world¡¯s largest DNA database, with up to 4.5 million DNA profiles stored. |
| The researchers show that a synthetic ¡°hole punching¡± antimicrobial depends on the presence of phosphoethanolamine, a cone-shaped lipid found in high concentrations within Gram-negative bacterial membranes. In their work, the researchers compared the survival of the bacterium Escherichia coli with that of a mutant strain of E. coli, which lacked PE lipids in its membrane. The fragile PE-deficient mutant strain out-survived the normal, healthy bacteria, when exposed to a ¡°hole punching¡± synthetic antibiotic. However, the opposite was true when both strains were exposed to tobramycin, a conventional metabolic antibiotic that targets the bacterial ribosomal machinery rather than the membrane.
|
| |
 |
| |