An international research team has discovered a gene that, when mutated, causes one of the most common forms of inherited blindness in babies. Scientists at the University of Leeds, working in collaboration with experts from other centres around the world, identified the gene, which is essential to photoreceptors in the eye, the cells that "see" light.

A human cell contains an enormous 1.8 metres of DNA partitioned into 46 chromosomes. These have to be copied and distributed equally into two daughter cells at every division.

Condensation, the shortening of chromosomes, allows the cell to handle such huge amounts of genetic material during cell division and helps preventing fatal defects in chromosome separation. Now researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) for the first time tracked chromosome condensation in mammalian cells over the entire course of cell division.

More time at the beach? It's hard to tell, but research in the British Journal of Dermatology says there is a correlation between skin cancer and income.

Skin cancer rates are up, based on their studies of trends in Northern Ireland. Analzying official cancer statistics for nearly 23,000 patients over a 12-year period, they reported a 20 percent increase in patients and a 62 percent increase in skin cancer samples processed by pathology laboratories.

Being wealthy didn't protect anyone. Women living in affluent areas were 29 percent more likely than people living in disadvantaged areas to suffer from basal cell carcinoma and nearly two and a half times more likely to suffer from malignant melanoma.

Men displayed a similar pattern.

A gene implicated in the development of cancer cells can be switched on using drugs, report researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. The finding could lead to a new class of targeted cancer therapies with potential to benefit many different cancer types.

Popular new drugs such as Herceptin and Gleevec more effectively treat cancer by targeting genetic mutations that express themselves in large amounts, causing cancer to develop. But cancers also arise because genes that control growth are turned off. While researchers can use these turned-off genes to identify or monitor cancer, currently no treatments actually target these genes.

A childhood sleep-related breathing disorder (SRBD) is known to have negative consequences on cognitive development, behavior, quality of life and utilization of health care resources. However, a research abstract that will be presented Monday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), finds that breastfeeding may provide long-term protection against the incidence or severity of a childhood SRBD.

Over the past few years we have been hearing about the anti-oxidising effect of the Mediterranean diet, however until now there have been no reliable scientific studies carried out to prove this. A team of IMIM-Hospital del Mar researchers consisting of Drs. Montserrat Fitó, Rafael de la Torre, Jaume Marrugat under the supervision of Dr. María Isabel Covas, have taken on the task.