But it works against some organisms where vancomycin, an old Eli Lilly (nyse: LLY - news - people ) drug that has been available in generic form for years, fails, and dalbavancin lasts in the body longer.
The scientists found many sections of the bug's DNA seemed to have been acquired from other organisms - some may even have come from humans.
"They are not plants or fungi but they are some major higher order of organisms, " he said.
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And since a huge majority of micro-organisms (by some estimates, 97%) cannot be cultured, that sounded like a great idea.
While many health advocates say eating genetically-modified plants appears to be safe, some say foods containing such organisms should be labeled as such.
Still, caffeine can cause some "cellular stress" to organisms, and another study this month will expose mussels to similar doses of caffeine to see its effects on their reproductive activity.
That's the kind of solution the feisty economist thinks genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will be for some of China's biggest problems, and the 44-year-old Huang has been pushing Chinese planners for almost six years to allow the commercialization of GM rice.
James Lovelock, who first proposed the Gaia theory, used an analogy with living organisms, all of which can, to some degree, regulate conditions within their own bodies.
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Some scientists suspect Mars once sheltered primitive, bacteria-like organisms and previous missions found evidence Mars at one time boasted ample quantities of water.
But PacBio still represents an interesting approach that will have immediate utility for some things, like sequencing germs and crops and new types of organisms, and its technology has the potential to get much, much faster.
The organisms do not fit easily into our classification schemes, though in some respects they resemble blue-green algae.
Some of the data it gathered about the abundance of phytoplankton - plant-like organisms that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and provide food for other sea life - could already be monitored by satellite.
The researchers also are developing protein-network maps for other organisms, including a yeast cell and Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm with some 19, 000 genes, about the same number as humans.
It is possible that the designer method can overcome some of the drawbacks involved with making fuel from algae, namely robustness and competitiveness of particular strains over other organisms, enhanced growth rate and yields of algal oil.
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