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Editor: Bijal Trivedi

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Taking a Snapshot of the Human Immune System

Source: National Cancer Institute Visuals Online, NIH

There are numerous tests to gauge the health of your heart. But no such widely accepted test exists for the many parts of the immune system. How can we tell if the immune system is strong or weak? Or quantify how badly it’s malfunctioning when we suffer

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Who Knew? Gut Bacteria Contribute to Malnutrition

Photo of an African girl with thin limbs and a distended abdomen.

A child suffering from kwashiorkor.Source: CDC/Phil

Here’s a surprising result from a new NIH-funded study: a poor diet isn’t the only cause of severe malnutrition. It seems that a ‘bad’ assortment of microbes in the intestine can conspire with a nutrient poor diet to promote and perpetuate malnutrition [1].

Most of us don’t spend time thinking

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Lighting up the Eyes

Image created using a nuclear label of a flat-mount preparation of the hyaloid vessels from the eye.Source: Richard Lang, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, OH

This image may conjure up thoughts of bioluminescent jellyfish, but it actually shows a network of developing blood vessels in the eye of a three day old mouse. A

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MRSA in a New Light

Credit: Frank DeLeo, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

At first glance, this image looks like something pulled from the files of NASA, not NIH. But, no, you are not looking at alien orbs on the rocky surface of some distant planet! This is a colorized scanning electron micrograph of a white

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Copy-editing the Genome: Extreme Personalized Medicine?

COOL TOOL. See how the TALE protein (rainbow colored) recognizes the target DNA site and wraps around the double helix. When this TALE protein is fused to a nuclease (the scissors), creating a TALEN, the hybrid protein will clip the DNA at the target site. Credit: Jeffry D. Sander, Massachusetts General Hospital

If I

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