Dr Mark Norman, Parks Victoria chief conservation scientist, said the colouration was caused by a harmless, single-cell alga known as Dunalliela.
Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis have much in common: Both cause many of the same gastrointestinal symptoms and both are marked by an improper response by the body's immune system to harmless cells or bacteria.
Sinister, aggressive prostate tumor cells — potentially fatal — must be detected amid indolent, harmless cells, though both types look similar on simple microscopic inspection.
Based on these data, cell suspensions used for autologous breast reconstruction should be enriched for harmless cells and possibly depleted for other progenitors that are now known to promote breast cancer local and metastatic growth (e.g. endothelial progenitors and/or ASCs, see Orecchioni et al, 2013).
At some point, after months or even years as a harmless cluster of cells, tumours may suddenly begin to generate blood vessels.
For the CRISPR trial, a UPenn-led team wants to remove T cells from patients and use a harmless virus to give the cells a receptor for NY-ESO-1, a protein that is often present on certain tumors but not on most healthy cells.
However, Professor MacLaren and his team have found a way of restoring a functional CHM gene to the eye, by transporting it in the cell of a harmless virus, which is injected underneath the retina with a very fine needle.
Some of these cells can also differentiate down an alternative pathway to a harmless lineage, such as T regulatory cells (Treg), or also CD8αα and invariant NK T cells (Stritesky et al., 2012).
Harvard University molecular biologist Konrad Hochedlinger, who last year reported using a harmless virus to reprogram mouse liver cells into iPS cells (ScienceNOW, 26 September 2008), says the paper is "an important proof of principle;... using protein is generally better than using DNA, which can always integrate [into host DNA] and cause mutations".
They then infected the cells with a harmless virus carrying the GFP gene and transplanted them into the ovaries of sterilized mice.
Kaye and colleagues' own vaccine candidate, which stimulates T cells with a harmless virus that carries sections of two Leishmania genes, has already undergone a safety study in people, but the results have not yet been published.
