In what appears to be an unexpected challenge to a long-accepted fact of biology, Johns Hopkins researchers say they have found that ribosomes — the molecular machines in all cells that build proteins — can sometimes do so even within the so-called untranslated regions of the ribbons of genetic material known as messenger RNA (mRNA).
The findings introduce new drug targets to selectively inhibit a key event in tumor cell progression.
A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has devised an improved method to re-engineer proteins into larger proteins, such as antibodies, to improve their usefulness.
Yale scientists have developed simple new proteins almost devoid of chemical diversity that still play a surprisingly active and specific role in cellular function, causing cells to act like cancer cells, they report Aug. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
With implications for future drug design, scientists The Scripps Research Institute’s Florida camps have shown an unprecedented mechanism for how a natural antibiotic with antitumor properties incorporates sulfur into its molecular structure, an essential ingredient of its antitumor activity.
Researchers reveal that the microRNA miR-7 suppresses stomach cancer by inhibiting a key signaling pathway, and that this protective mechanism is compromised by the cancer-causing bacterium H. pylori. Finding drugs capable of inducing miR-7 could therefore prove to be an effective treatment against the progression of gastric cancer.
An emerging technique called fluctuation X-ray scattering (FXS) could provide much more detail about a protein’s molecular structure than traditional solution scattering. But a major limitation for FXS has been a lack of math methods to efficiently interpret the data. That’s where Berkeley Lab’s M-TIP comes in.
While most of us worry about the fat cells building up on the fleshy parts of our bodies, scientists are paying serious attention to another kind of fat cell deep inside our bones, in the marrow. Today, they’ve published new important clues about it, including a discovery that there are two types.
Last December, researchers identified more than 1,000 gene mutations in individuals with autism, but how these mutations increased risk for autism was unclear. Now, UNC researchers are the first to show how one of these mutations disables a molecular switch in one of these genes to cause autism.
New research from The Wistar Institute has identified an interaction between proteins that provides a pivotal role in organizing chromosomes during mitosis so that vital genetic information gets passed on safely.
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have shown how aging cripples the production of new immune cells, decreasing the immune system’s response to vaccines and putting the elderly at risk of infection.
Case Western Reserve University scientists have discovered that a protein called Kruppel-like Factor 4 (KLF4) controls mitochondria — the “power plants” in cells that catalyze energy production. The researchers’ findings appear in the August edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Researchers analyzed circadian rhythms in abundance and type of microbiota in the gut and feces of mice using genetic sequencing. They found that the absolute abundance of a large group of rod-shaped bacteria common in the gut and skin of animals, and relative species make-up of the microbiome, changed over a 24-hour cycle, and this rhythmicity was more pronounced in female mice.
A study including researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago found evidence that gut microbes affect circadian rhythms and metabolism in mice.
Salk scientists unveil how a critical molecule turns on T cells.
In two companion papers published in Cell, researchers from MIT's Koch Institute reveal why proliferating cells — including those in tumors — require mitochondrial respiration. While there are other ways to make ATP, cells can’t proliferate without access to electron acceptors provided by respiration.
Research led by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital reveals how the tumor suppressor protein p53 works in the cytoplasm to trigger death via apoptosis and identifies a potential cancer treatment strategy.
Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine report that a nuanced, targeted version of parental control over gene expression, is the method of choice over classic genomic imprinting. Published in Cell Reports, so-called noncanonical imprinting is particularly prevalent in the brain, and skews the genetic message in subpopulations of cells so that mom, or dad, has a stronger say. The mechanism can influence offspring behavior, and because it is observed more frequently than classic imprinting, appears to be preferred.
Health experts have warned for years that the overuse of antibiotics is creating “superbugs” able to resist drugs treating infection. Now scientists at Indiana University and elsewhere are finding evidence that an invisible war between microorganisms may also be catching humans in the crossfire.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have demonstrated a direct connection between two signaling proteins and liver fibrosis, a scarring process underlying chronic liver disease, the 12th leading cause of death in the United States.
A team led by Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used the OLCF’s Titan to achieve a milestone in the field of biomolecular simulation, modeling a complete photosynthetic organelle of the bacteria Rhodobacter sphaeroides in atomic detail. The project, a 100-million atom spherical chromatophore, is the first of its kind, giving scientists a system-level understanding of a fundamental biological process based on all-atom precision.
Sergei Maslov, a computational biologist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, and Alexei Tkachenko, a scientist at Brookhaven's Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), have developed a model that explains how simple monomers could rapidly make the jump to more complex self-replicating polymers. What their model points to could have intriguing implications for the origins of life on Earth and CFN's work in engineering artificial self-assembly at the nanoscale.
One question of the origin of life in particular remains problematic: what enabled the leap from a primordial soup of individual monomers to self-replicating polymer chains? A new model published this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics, proposes a potential mechanism by which self-replication could have emerged. It posits that template-assisted ligation, the joining of two polymers by using a third, longer one as a template, could have enabled polymers to become self-replicating.
Immune cells that hang around after parasitic skin infection help ward off secondary attack. These skin squatters may prove to be the key to successful anti-parasite vaccines.
Research published in the journal Cell Reports challenges the most popular theory about why our bodies deteriorate in old age. Scientists know that as we grow older our cells accumulate particles, called free radicals. It has long been thought that free radicals wreak havoc by damaging proteins and impairing their function – but the new research shows that proteins can survive unscathed.
Study suggests that drugs targeting the lymphotoxin-beta receptor may improve liver cancer treatment.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have developed a computer algorithm that is helping scientists see how drugs produce pharmacological effects inside the body. The study, published in the journal Cell, could help researchers create drugs that are more efficient and less prone to side effects, suggest ways to regulate a drug's activity, and identify novel therapeutic uses for new and existing compounds.
A new study by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reveals a protein’s critical – and previously unknown -- role in the development and progression of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a fast-growing and extremely difficult-to-treat blood cancer. The study was published July 23 in Cell Stem Cell.
The Histone Antibody Specificity Database (www.histoneantibodies.com), is a newly launched online portal that lets scientists find the right antibodies for their research with a much higher degree of confidence than ever before.
Other topics include editing genes, cellular switchboards, treating menopause and more...
Like a collection of ragtag villagers fighting off an invading army, the mix of bacteria that live in our guts may band together to keep dangerous infections from taking hold, new research suggests. But some “villages” may succeed better than others at holding off the invasion, because of key differences in the kinds of bacteria that make up their feisty population.
A biomedical breakthrough in the journal Nature reveals never-before-seen details of the human body’s cellular switchboard that regulates sensory and hormonal responses. The work is based on an X-ray laser experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
In recent years, immunotherapy has emerged as a promising treatment for certain cancers. Now this strategy, which uses patients’ own immune cells, genetically engineered to target tumors, has shown significant success against multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells that is largely incurable. The results appeared in a study published online today in Nature Medicine.
A research team funded by the National Institutes of Health has generated a novel system for growing cardiac tissue from undifferentiated stem cells on a culture plate. This heart on a chip is a miniature physiologic system that could be used to model early heart development and screen drugs prescribed during pregnancy. Researchers from the University of California (UC) Berkeley; the Gladstone Institutes, in San Francisco; and UC San Francisco, reported their work in the July 14, 2015, online issue of Nature Communications.
A new study in Developmental Cell, from Stowers Institute for Medical Research Associate Investigator Tatjana Piotrowski, Ph.D., zeros in on an important component in fish: the support cells that surround centrally-located hair cells in each garlic-shaped sensory organ, or neuromast.
An Argonne/University of Tennessee research team reconstructed the crystal structure of BAP, a protein involved in the process by which marine archaea release carbon, to determine how it functioned, as well as its larger role in carbon cycling in marine sediments.
Stem cells are key for the continual renewal of tissues in our bodies. As such, manipulating stem cells also holds much promise for biomedicine if their regenerative capacity can be harnessed. Researchers are making headway in this area by studying stem cells in their natural environment in fruitflies.
In the face of growing concerns about the reproducibility of published scientific data, a special task force of the American Society for Cell Biology has made 13 recommendations to tighten standards, improve statistics and ethics training, and encourage self-policing by life scientists.
A single molecule called DNA-PKcs may drive metastatic processes that turn cancer from a slowly growing relatively benign disease to a killer.
Canadian and British researchers have discovered that chromosomes play an active role in animal cell division. This occurs at a precise stage – cytokinesis – when the cell splits into two new daughter cells.
A team from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and their collaborators developed and evaluated the MiSI method for classifying microbial species that could be supplemented – as needed – by traditional approaches relied on by microbiologists for decades.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s James Crowe, M.D., Ann Scott Carell Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, and his team are reporting the first large panel of antibody treatments against the chikungunya virus in the current issue of Cell Host and Microbe.
Other topics include repairing injured nerves, busted heart attack treatment, decorative brain molecules, and more...
As advances in medicine allow individuals to live longer, people are facing unique age-related health challenges. As they age, organs such as the kidneys become more susceptible to injury, and their ability to self-repair is decreased. Researchers from the University of Missouri have found a cellular signal that causes kidney cells to die, making the kidneys prone to injury. This finding could lead to improved kidney function in the elderly.
When Greek mythology and cell biology meet, you get the protein Callipygian, recently discovered and named by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University for its role in determining which area of a cell becomes the back as it begins to move.
Cedars-Sinai researchers have successfully tested two new methods for preserving cognition in laboratory mice that exhibit features of Alzheimer’s disease by using white blood cells from bone marrow and a drug for multiple sclerosis to control immune response in the brain.
Studying brain scans and cerebrospinal fluid of healthy adults, scientists have shown that changes in key biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease during midlife may help identify those who will develop dementia years later, according to new research.
The investigation of a simple protein has uncovered its uniquely complicated role in the spread of the childhood cancer, osteosarcoma. It turns out the protein, called ezrin, acts like an air traffic controller, coordinating multiple functions within a cancer cell and allowing it to endure stress conditions encountered during metastasis.
New research suggests that a molecule commonly found “decorating” brain cells in higher animals, including humans, may affect brain structure. The study showed that small changes made in how sialic acid attaches to cell surfaces can cause damaged brain structure, poor motor skills, hyperactivity and learning difficulties in mice.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right