Transgenic Tobacco with medicinal effects
Professor Mario Pezzotti, University of Verona, is in lieu of creating transgenic tobacco plants. These plants will produce biologically active interleukin-10, which is a post anti- inflammatory cytokine. To check the effectiveness of such plants, he will be feeding mice suffering from autoimmune diseases with transgenic tobacco. Ongoing researches have proved that tobacco plants have are able to process both the forms of IL-10, one from virus and one from the mouse. If this research becomes successful, then small amount of doses could help prevent type1 diabetes mellitus.
According to Pezzotti, "Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements. The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis."

Sensing starvation increases resistance of bacteria to antibiotics
Bacteria become starved for nutrients during infection, which is the main cause of resistance in them. Starved bacteria resist killing by nearly every type of antibiotic, even ones they have never been exposed to before.
Bacteria become starved when they exhaust nutrient supplies in the body, or if they together form biofilms.
Biofilms are clusters of bacteria encased in a slimy coating, and can be found both in the natural environment as well as in human tissues where they cause disease. Bacteria in biofilms tolerate high levels of antibiotics without being killed. Earlier starvation was thought to produce resistance because most antibiotics target cellular functions needed for growth. When starved cells stop growing, these targets are no longer active. This effect could reduce the effectiveness of many drugs.
As soon as bacteria sense that its nutritional supply is running low, they produce a chemical alarm signal. This signal alerts the bacteria to prepare them for starvation. To check whether this alarm also leads to the mechanism of antibiotic resistance, some of the bacteria were engineered without this alarm. Results showed that bacteria unable to sense starvation were thousands of times more sensitive to killing than those that could, even though starvation arrested growth and the activity of antibiotic targets.

Bacteria’s do have a molecular nose!!!
Researchers at Newcastle University have discovered that bacteria also have a sense of smell. They can detect airborne, smell producing chemicals such as ammonia. Their sense of smell is known as the ability of olfaction. Olfaction means sensing volatile chemicals in the air such as ammonia, produced by rival bacteria in the environment.
The research also showed that the bacteria can respond to this smell by producing a biofilm. Biofilm is the property of individual bacteria joining together to colonise in an area to push out any potential competitor.
This latest discovery shows that bacteria are capable of at least four of the five senses; responsiveness to light, sight, contact-dependent gene expression, touch and a response to chemicals and toxins in their environment either through direct contact, taste or through the air smell.
Ammonia is one of the key nutrient for growth of bacteria.Using rival bacteria Bacillus subtilis and B.licheniformus, both commonly found in the soil, the team found that each produced a biofilm in response to airborne ammonia and that the response decreased as the distance between the two bacterial colonies increased.
Project supervisor Professor Grant Burgess, director of the Dove Marine Laboratory, said that understanding the triggers that prompt this sort of response had huge potential. "The sense of smell has been observed in many creatures, even yeasts and slime moulds, but our work shows for the first time that a sense of smell even exists in lowly bacteria. "From an evolutionary perspective, we believe this may be the first example of how living creatures first learned to smell other living creatures. "It is an early observation and much work is still to be done but, nevertheless, this is an important breakthrough which also shows how complex bacteria are and how they use a growing number of ways to communicate with each other.
"Bacterial infections kill millions of people every year and discovering how your bacterial enemies communicate with each other is an important step in winning this war. This research provides clues to so far unknown ways of bacterial communication."

Cure for AIDS
There is a ray of hope given by researchers for the treatment of most deadly disease “ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME”. The question arises that “Is there a magic protein out there that will neutralize the HIV virus”? Scientists at International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) are already working on HIV virus.
The HIV virus integrates and hijacks the host genome and induces latency. Moreover, the immune responses in case of HIV infection are not only inadequate and ineffective but also not fully known. The development is based on the HIV envelope proteins, which are exposed to the immune system, that mainly comprise one large protein called gp120. Initially, vaccines were targeted against gp120 and intended to generate antibodies against HIV-1 envelope to neutralize the virus.
Hope came in the form of RV 144 vaccine trial that involved 16,000 volunteers in Thailand. The results generated after trials were only 30% but we can quote that for the first time a vaccine has provided some sort of protection against the HIV virus. The RV144 vaccine is also a viral vector prime and recombinant gp120 protein boost that has shown an efficacy of 31 percent. Result of the immune correlate study, recently declared at the AIDS 2011 conference; indicate a possible protective role of antibodies against the V1/V2 loop of gp120 in uninfected participants.
It has also been reported that people infected with HIV virus did not show any kind of symptoms of AIDS. Dr David N Cook, executive vice president & chief operating officer, IAVI, says, “With this development we have moved closer to the vaccine. I think first generation vaccine would be available by 2020, and the second-generation vaccine by 2025. The next milestone would be to test the vaccine candidate neutralizing antibodies in the animal model and the target for that is end of 2013 or early 2014. To get there, we need to screen hundreds of candidates each year. The problem is that in science the results cannot be predicted.”