Aspirin didn’t pan out. Neither did two other potential anti-aging agents. But a synthetic derivative of a pungent desert shrub is now a front- runner in ongoing animal experiments to find out if certain chemicals, known to inhibit inflammation, cancer and other destructive processes, can boost the odds of living longer.

University of Michigan scientist Richard A. Miller reports early results from a mouse study his lab and two others are conducting for the National Institute on Aging. The study, now in its fourth year, will test as many as two dozen possible anti-aging agents in animals in the next five years.

A team of scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Center show that a key inflammatory regulator, a known villain when it comes to parsing out damage after a stroke and other brain injuries, seems to do the opposite in Alzheimer’s disease, protecting the brain and helping get rid of clumps of material known as plaques that are a hallmark of the disease.

Based on clues provided by a study with transgenic mice, a research group at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has developed a strategy that will be tested as the first treatment for people with hereditary inclusion body myopathy (HIBM), a rare, degenerative muscle disease. In an unexpected finding, the research indicates that the approach also might benefit patients with certain kidney disorders.

The Sleeping Beauty tranposon (SB-Tn) system, a gene therapy technology that avoids the pitfalls of transferring genes with viruses, shows promise in laboratory experiments for correcting the gene defect responsible for sickle cell disease (SCD), scientists in Minnesota are reporting.

The wild tiger now occupies a mere 7 percent of its historic range, and the area known to be inhabited by tigers has declined by 41 percent over the past decade, according to an article published in the June 2007 issue of BioScience.

Growing trade in folk medicines made from tiger parts and tiger skins, along with habitat loss and fragmentation, is believed to be the chief reason for the losses. The assessment, by Eric Dinerstein of the World Wildlife Fund and 15 coauthors, describes the wild tiger's population trajectory as "catastrophic" and urges international cooperation to ensure the animal's continued existence in the wild.

Scientists have captured on video the intracellular version of a postal delivery service. Reporting in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), bioengineering researchers at UC San Diego published videos of a key message-carrying protein called paxillin moving abruptly from hubs of communication and transportation activity on the cell surface toward the nucleus. Paxillin was labeled with a red fluorescence marker to make it stand out in live cells.