Knowledge Update

​New York, Oct 10 (IANS) Researchers have identified an enzyme that has caused rifampicin -- a popular antibiotic used to treat bacteria that causes tuberculosis, leprosy, and Legionnaire's disease -- to become less effective and develop more resistance.

The actions of the enzyme Rifampicin monooxygenase -- a flavoenzyme which is a family of enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions essential for microbial survival -- have been found responsible for the antibiotic's resistance.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the major problems in modern medicine," said Heba Adbelwahab, graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the US. 

Rifampicin, also known as Rifampin, has been used to treat bacterial infections for more than 40 years. It works by preventing the bacteria from making RNA, a step necessary for growth.

The findings represent the first detailed biochemical characterisation of a flavoenzyme involved in antibiotic resistance, the researchers said.

"Our studies have shown how this enzyme deactivates rifampicin. We now have a blueprint to inhibit this enzyme and prevent antibiotic resistance," Adbelwahab added.

Tuberculosis, leprosy, and Legionnaire's disease are infections caused by different species of bacteria. While treatable, the diseases pose a threat to children, the elderly, people in developing countries without access to adequate health care, and people with compromised immune systems.

For the study, the team used a special technique called X-ray crystallography to describe the structure of this enzyme. 

They also reported the biochemical studies that allow them to determine the mechanisms by which the enzyme deactivates this important antibiotic.

The results were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and PLOS One.

​Washington, Oct 8 (IANS) US President Barack Obama has issued an executive order to lift economic sanctions on Myanmar.

The move came on Friday after Obama's announcement that the US was ready to lift sanctions on the Asian country during Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to

Washington, Oct 7 (IANS) International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank leaders have called for measures to promote inclusive growth and resist anti-trade sentiments.

"Globalisation has worked over the years, that it has delivered great benefits to many people. We do not think that it is time to push against it," Xinhua news agency quoted IMF

London, Oct 9 (IANS) The absence of a particular molecule from cells can make tumours recur even after immunotherapy, a group of researchers from Germany has found.

Immunotherapy is a new and highly promising form of treatment for cancer.

A team of researchers from the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and Charite -- Universitatsmedizin Berlin will help doctors in selecting suitable target points for immunotherapy.

One form of immunotherapy for cancer is T-cell receptor gene therapy that involves removing T-cells (a type of immune cell) from the blood and altering them in the test tube to enable them to target cancer cells.

"The tumours are not recognised by the T-cells. We want to find out how to reduce the frequency with which the cancer recurs after treatment," biologist Ana Textor said.

To achieve this, the researchers trained two different types of T-cell. One of the T-cell types permanently destroyed the tumours in a mouse model. After treatment with the other T-cell type, initial tumour regression was followed by recurrence.

The researchers found that when the tumour recurred, a particular molecule on the cell surface -- called the epitope -- was no longer present on the cell surface in sufficient quantity.

This was because the epitopes in these cancer cells were no longer correctly trimmed enzymatically -- in this case by the enzyme ERAAP.

By contrast, the epitopes on the cells of the successfully treated tumour did not require processing by ERAAP and were therefore also not dependent on stimulation by interferon gamma.

According to Textor, epitopes that do not need processing by the enzyme ERAAP are therefore, likely to be a better choice for immunotherapy.

The findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

​New York, Oct 9 (IANS) Motivation can act as the best defence against distractions that arise while performing activities that are both difficult as well as an easy, a study has found.

In the study, the researchers from the University of Illinois, have challenged the popular notion that people become more distractible as they tackle increasingly difficult tasks.

On the contrary, they found that it is the simpler tasks that causes individuals to become distracted more easily.

Those who get engaged in an easy tasks were more likely to have distractions than those engaged in an extremely challenging tasks.

Further, the more complex the activity, the more attention you have to give to the task at hand, and the less time you have for outside distractions, the study stated.

"This suggests that focus on complex mental tasks reduces a person's sensitivity to events in the world that are not related to those tasks," said Simona Buetti, Professor at University of Illinois.

"When the need for inner focus is high, we may have the impression that we momentarily disengage from the world entirely in order to achieve a heightened degree of mental focus," Buetti added.

This finding corroborates a phenomenon called "inattentional blindness", in which people involved in an engaging task often fail to notice strange and unexpected events.

The bigger the task, the less likely they are to notice their surroundings, the researchers observed.

For the study, the team tracked eye movements of volunteers as they solved math problems of various difficulty while looking at neutral photographs.

The results showed that the more difficult the math problem, the more likely the volunteers' eyes were to wander.

The ability to avoid being distracted is not driven primarily by the difficulty of the task, but is likely the result of an individual's level of engagement with the endeavour, the researchers concluded.

​Washington, Oct 7 (IANS) Using NASA's Hubble space telescope data, scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star.

The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon, NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

Astronomers have estimated that this stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

"We knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but this is the first time we are seeing this process in action," said lead author of the study Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae. 

The star is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light years away and which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes. 

Red giants are dying stars in the late stages of life that are exhausting their nuclear fuel that makes them shine. They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space.

The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. 

According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. 

As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

This star system could be the archetype to explain a dazzling variety of glowing shapes uncovered by Hubble that are seen around dying stars, called planetary nebulae, the researchers said. 

A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gas expelled by a star late in its life.

"We suggest that these gaseous blobs produced during this late phase of a star's life help make the structures seen in planetary nebulae," Sahai noted.

Sahai's team used Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to conduct observations of V Hydrae and its surrounding region over an 11-year period, first from 2002 to 2004, and then from 2011 to 2013. 

The results appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.

​New York, Oct 7 (IANS) Snap Inc -- the parent company of popular photo-sharing messaging service Snapchat -- is considering an initial public offering (IPO) that can value the company at $25 billion or more, media reported on Friday.

New York, Oct 7 (IANS) Snap Inc -- the parent company of popular photo-sharing messaging service Snapchat -- is considering an initial public offering (IPO) that can value the company at $25 billion or more, media reported on Friday.

​Seoul, Oct 7 (IANS) Samsung Electronics saw its operating profit rise in the third quarter despite a global recall of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, the company said on Friday.

The South Korean tech behemoth posted 7.8 trillion won ($7 billion) in its preliminary figure for operating profit during the July-September period, up 5.55 per cent from the

​London, Oct 7 (IANS) The next time you visit a hospital, do not be surprised if you find robots as your new nursing assistants.

Robots can imitate human motions as well as effectively coordinate their actions with humans even with surgeries, a research has found.