Researchers have been aware of the DNA damage that smoking causes. A research team headed by Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar, MD, PhD, the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UNC's School of Medicine has created a method that maps DNA damage due to cigarette smoking across the genome. Read more about their research here.

Dr. Robert Davey, a virologist in the Department of Immunology and Virology at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, and his team focused their research on the mechanism by which Ebola virus infects a cell and discovered a promising drug therapy. They tested a small molecule called Tetrandrine, which was derived from a Chinese herb, on mice. Read on to find the results of this study. 

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at John Hopkins University published a paper which suggested that random mutations in DNA had a significant role to play in cancer development. These findings were popularly interpreted to mean that “bad luck,” more than any other causative factor, leads to cancer. This has sparked a debate among the experts in the field. Read more about this here.

Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, studied centrioles and discovered the possibility that centrioles might carry defective mutations that could pass on a broad range of diseases to a growing embryo. Read more about their research here.

The use of antiperspirants and deodorants has increased greatly. Therefore, researchers from North Carolina State University, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, North Carolina Central University, Rutgers University, and Duke University wanted to understand whether using these products affects the microbial ecosystem on the skin. Read more about their research here.

How cancerous tumors form has been a topic of interest for cancer researchers. Now a new study conducted at the University of Iowa (UI) offers important information underlying tumor formation. A team of researchers studied the 3D recordings of movements of cancerous human breast tissue cells in real time. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California, led by stem cell researcher Lindsey Barske, have identified the molecular signals that control the development of the vertebrate face. They studied the early development in zebrafish using hi-tech genetic, genomic and imaging tools to understand how facial patterns form. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the University of Missouri have been able to procure detailed images of the capsid protein, which is a key protein in HIV, in its natural state. Read more about their research here.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University found evidence that an algae-infecting virus is capable of invading mammalian cells. Acanthocystis turfacea chlorella virus 1, or ATCV-1, is a pathogen belonging to a class of chloroviruses that was believed to thrive only in green algae. Read more about their research here.

Biologists at University of California, San Diego, have discovered that bacteria living in biofilm communities interact with each other using “ion channels,” which is an electrical signaling method that is similar to the communication signals used by neurons in human brain. Read more about their research here.