In a letter published in the Lancet medical journal on October 14, Steve Bellan and Lauren Ancel Meyers, speculate that Ebola may be silently immunizing large numbers of people who never fal ill or infect others. If so, they might bolster front-line health care responses to the ongoing outbreak. Learn more in our press release.
As Ebola continues to spread in West Africa, it may be silently immunizing large numbers of people who never fall ill or infect others, yet become protected from future infection. If such immunity is confirmed, it would have significant ramifications on projections of how widespread the disease will be and could help determine strategies that health workers use to contain the disease, according to a letter published Tuesday in the Lancet medical journal.
Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, was interviewed by the Huffington Post Science editor David Freeman. Meyers, a pioneer in the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, discusses Ebola and how outbreaks of infectious diseases are governed by complex mathematics.
The following excerpt is from an article and podcast by Jorge Salazar, published August 12, 2014 on the TACC website:
Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique to move and position a single bacterium using a highly focused laser. The precise control offered by this tool will allow researchers to better study how bacterial biofilms form.
A common practice millions of Americans partake in to stay healthy is actually doing much more harm than good and may be contributing to the spread of drug-resistant disease.
Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered that a protein produced by the influenza A virus helps it outwit one of our body's natural defense mechanisms. That makes the protein a potentially good target for antiviral drugs directed against the influenza A virus.
Ribosomes are essential for life, generating all of the proteins required for cells to grow. Mutations in some of the proteins that make ribosomes cause disorders characterized by bone marrow failure and anemia early in life, followed by elevated cancer risk in middle age. These disorders are generally called “ribosomopathies.”
![ribosome-export-landscape.jpg](/images/easyblog_shared/2014/ribosome-export-landscape.jpg "In this illustration, ribosomes emerge from the nucleus and undergo their final maturation in the cytoplasm. This is where the "test drive" happens. Illustration credit: Marianna Grenadier/University of Texas at Austin.")
A team led by Chris Sullivan, a professor of molecular biosciences at The University of Texas at Austin, has provided the first positive evidence that RNA interference (RNAi), a biological process in which small RNA molecules prevent genes from being expressed, does not play a role as an antiviral in most body, or “somatic,” cells in mammals.
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