Somatic cell nuclear-transferred (SCNT) oocytes have a high potential for development in vitro, but a large proportion of embryos that are transferred to recipients is aborted before parturition. The precise mechanism for the high abortion rate is unknown, but abnormal placenta formation is frequently observed in SCNT-cloned pregnancies. The present study examined the effects of treating the recipients with cyclosporin A (CsA), an immunoprotectant, on the proportion of fetuses resulting from SCNT-cloned pregnancies. Cloned embryos developed from enucleated oocytes and receiving cumulus cells from F1 (C57BL/6 × DBA, H-2b/d) females were transferred to outbred ICR (in which the H-2 complex was not fixed) recipient females. Each recipient received an intraperitoneal injection of CsA or vehicle. Compared with vehicle, administration of CsA to recipients on day 4.5 of pregnancy significantly increased the proportion of fetuses observed on day 10.5. The proportion of fetuses at day 18.5 of pregnancy in recipients receiving CsA treatment was slightly higher than that in controls. This study is the first to report that CsA administration increases the proportion of fetuses resulting from SCNT-cloned pregnancies.

This is a tale, over 500 years in the making, of how a university–community farm collaborative research project turned corn smut into gold.

Malaria remains one of the biggest health problems in large parts of the world. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, it is currently estimated that there are more than 150 million clinical cases annually, and that about 2 million people die from the disease every year. The bulk of malaria-related morbidity and mortality in an endemic setting (malaria is regularly found) is concentrated in children below the age of five years, and the increasing resistance to infection and disease with age is conventionally thought to reflect a slow and gradual acquisition of protective immunity. Many recent and comprehensive reviews of malarial immunity exist; rather than attempting to add another, this review summarises some of the recent evidence on how protective immunity is acquired in humans and what precipitates clinical disease, specifically as it relates to populations living in areas where the disease is endemic. It is becoming increasingly clear that naturally acquired protective immunity depends largely on responses directed against highly variable parasite antigens. This implies that a successful blood-stage vaccine against this disease must be able to either induce protective responses against many of these variants, or artificially initiate protective immune responses that do not normally occur following natural exposure to the parasites. Such protective immune responses might either rely on a different immunological mechanism, or be directed against other antigens, other than those seen in naturally acquired protective immunity. It remains to be seen whether it will be possible to induce protective responses such as these by ‘artificially’ immunising humans.