For the first time, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have identified small molecules that allow for complete control over a genetic defect responsible for the most common adult onset form of muscular dystrophy.
Research focused on the regulation of the adult stem cells that line the gastrointestinal tract of Drosophila suggests new models for the study of Barrett’s esophagus. Barrett’s esophagus is a condition in which the cells of the lower esophagus transform into stomach-like cells. In most cases this transformation has been thought to occur directly from chronic acid indigestion. A new study suggests a change in stem cell function for this transformation.
A team led by UC San Francisco researchers has discovered a sensory system in the foreleg of the fruit fly that tells male flies whether a potential mate is from a different species. The work addresses a central problem in evolution that is poorly understood: how animals of one species know not to mate with animals of other species.
A new study in PLOS ONE that examined food poisoning infection as-it-happens in mice revealed harmful bacteria, such as a common type of Salmonella, takes over beneficial bacteria within the gut amid previously unseen changes to the gut environment. The results provide new insights into the course of infection and could lead to better prevention or new treatments.
Using biochemistry and mass spectrometry, researchers “trapped” scores of new candidate substrates of the protease ClpXP to reveal how protein degradation is critical to cell cycle progression and bacterial development. The new understanding could lead to identifying new antibiotic targets.
Researchers led by M. Mahmood Hussain, PhD, found that a regulatory RNA molecule interferes with the production of lipoproteins and, in a mouse model, reduces hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis.
A major study from researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology provides new revelations about the intricate pathways involved in turning on T cells, the body’s most important disease-fighting cells, and was published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. The La Jolla Institute team is the first to prove that a certain type of protein, called septins, play an essential role in T cell activation.
Development of skin cancer may require changes in the genes that control cell shape, report a team of scientists from three institutions in an upcoming issue of Nature Cell Biology. The work could lead to a better understanding of how the cells become metastatic.
Scientists have discovered the survival secret to a genetic mutation that stokes leukemia cells, solving an evolutionary riddle and paving the way to a highly targeted therapy for leukemia. In a paper published today in Cell, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center describe how a mutated protein, called Fbxw7, behaves differently when expressed in cancer cells versus healthy cells.
Better treatments for people suffering from compromised intestinal immunity may emerge from a small-animal model of human intestinal immune development.
In this week’s issue of Nature, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute report their discovery of an important trick that a well-known intrinsically disordered protein uses to expand and control its functionality.
A team from the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center of Columbia University has generated patient-specific beta cells, or insulin-producing cells, that accurately reflect the features of maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY).
Memory improved in mice injected with a small, drug-like molecule discovered by UCSF San Francisco researchers studying how cells respond to biological stress.
In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a research team from University of North Carolina at Charlotte announced that they had uncovered a previously unknown surveillance mechanism, known as a DNA damage checkpoint, used by cells to monitor oxidatively damaged DNA. The finding, first-authored by UNC Charlotte biology graduate student Jeremy Willis and undergraduate honors student Yogin Patel, was also co-authored by undergraduate honors student Barry L. Lentz and assistant professor of biology Shan Yan.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have identified key triggers of an important cancer-blocking mechanism in cells. Termed “oncogene-induced senescence,” this mechanism can block most cancer types and is commonly experienced when incipient skin cancers turn instead into slow-growing moles.
Scientists at North Carolina State University have found the first example of how micro-RNA regulates wood formation inside plant cells and mapped out key relationships that control the process.
Biologists from Indiana University and Montana State University have discovered a striking connection between viruses such as HIV and Ebola and viruses that infect organisms called archaea that grow in volcanic hot springs. Despite the huge difference in environments and a 2 billion year evolutionary time span between archaea and humans, the viruses hijack the same set of proteins to break out of infected cells.
Humans have been raising cows for their meat, hides and milk for millennia. Now it appears that the cow immune system also has something to offer. A new study led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) focusing on an extraordinary family of cow antibodies points to new ways to make human medicines.
A new study by Boston University researchers provides evidence that Wolbachia target the ovarian stem cell niches of its hosts—a strategy previously overlooked to explain how Wolbachia thrive in nature.
In a pair of distinct but complementary papers, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues illuminate the functional importance of a relatively new class of RNA molecules. The work, published online this week in the journal Nature, suggests modulation of “enhancer-directed RNAs” or “eRNAs” could provide a new way to alter gene expression in living cells, perhaps affecting the development or pathology of many diseases.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center, have identified a new mechanism that appears to suppress tumor growth, opening the possibility of developing a new class of anti-cancer drugs.
Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have determined the role of a key growth factor, found in limited quantities in human skin cells, that helps hair follicles form and regenerate during the wound healing process. When this growth factor, called Fgf9, was overexpressed in a mouse model, there was a two- to three-fold increase in the number of new hair follicles produced. Researchers believe that this growth factor could be used therapeutically for people with various hair and scalp disorders. The study appears in an advance online publication of Nature Medicine.
Findings could have implications in treatment of hereditary neuropathy.
Dr. Jung-Mo Ahn, associate professor of chemistry at The University of Texas at Dallas, has designed and synthesized a novel small molecule that might become a large weapon in the fight against prostate cancer.
The protein GATA-3 plays an important role in mammalian immune response, but its overall function in cell development and cancer formation is not well understood. In an effort to further define the importance of GATA-3, researchers at the University of North Carolina have traced how the protein performs important functions in CD8+T-cell type of the immune system.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have devised a powerful new technique for finding antibodies that have a desired biological effect. The newly reported technique should greatly speed the process of discovering medicines, diagnostics and laboratory reagents.
Scientists have uncovered a survival mechanism that occurs in breast cells that have just turned premalignant-cells on the cusp between normalcy and cancers-which may lead to new methods of stopping tumors.
Allergens? No. Inflammation? No. An over-active gene that interrupts lipid synthesis appears to be the cause of 20-30% childhood asthma cases.
The recent discovery by a McGill University led team of scientists of a bacterium that is able to thrive at –15ºC, the coldest temperature ever reported for bacterial growth, is exciting because it offers clues about some of the necessary preconditions for microbial life on Mars.
University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers uncover surprising insights about how nerve cells rewire themselves, shedding light on a process linked with neurodegenerative diseases and neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia and autism.
The human gut is loaded with helpful bacteria microbes, yet the immune system seemingly turns a blind eye. Now, researchers know how this friendly truce is kept intact. Innate lymphoid cells directly limit the response by inflammatory T cells to commensal bacteria in the gut of mice. Loss of this ILC function effectively puts the immune system on an extended war footing against the commensal bacteria a condition observed in multiple chronic inflammatory diseases.
A new study of both computer-created and natural proteins suggests that the number of unique pockets – sites where small molecule pharmaceutical compounds can bind to proteins – is surprisingly small, meaning drug side effects may be impossible to avoid.
Innate lymphoid cells protect boundary tissues such as the skin, lung, and the gut from microbial onslaught. They also have shown they play a role in inflammatory disease. Researchers have found that maturation of ILC2s requires T-cell factor 1 to move forward. They describe in Immunity that one mechanism used to build ILCs is the same as that in T cells. Both cell types use a protein pathway centered on Notch.
Some materials dissolve too quickly, before cardiac arteries can fully heal, and some hang around forever. Zinc, however, may be just right.
Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression -- even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells.
Experiments at Johns Hopkins have unearthed clues about which protein signaling molecules are allowed into hollow, hair-like “antennae,” called cilia, that alert cells to critical changes in their environments.
A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has found how to boost or inhibit a gene-silencing mechanism that normally serves as a major controller of cells’ activities. The discovery could lead to a powerful new class of drugs against viral infections, cancers and other diseases.
By monitoring the behavior of a class of cells in the brains of living mice, neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins discovered that these cells remain highly dynamic in the adult brain, where they transform into cells that insulate nerve fibers and help form scars that aid in tissue repair.
Wake Forest Baptist research looks at gene expression profiling in breast cancer.
A seven-year quest to understand how breast cancer cells resist treatment with the targeted therapy lapatinib has revealed a previously unknown molecular network that regulates cell death. The discovery provides new avenues to overcome drug resistance, according to researchers at Duke Cancer Institute.
Type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes appears to increase the risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death among people with high blood sugar, partly by stimulating the production of calprotectin, a protein that sparks an inflammatory process that fuels the buildup of artery-clogging plaque.
Researchers have uncovered mutations in the phosphatase Wip1 that enable cancer cells to foil the tumor suppressor p53, according to a study in The Journal of Cell Biology. The results could provide a new target for the treatment of certain cancers.
The human body contains trillions of cells, all derived from a single cell, or zygote, made by the fusion of an egg and a sperm. That single cell contains all the genetic information needed to develop into a human, and passes identical copies of that information to each new cell as it divides into the many diverse types of cells that make up a complex organism like a human being.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered why breast cancer patients with dense breasts are more likely than others to develop aggressive tumors that spread. The finding opens the door to drug treatments that prevent metastasis.
Scientists discovered new details about an assembly intricate process in cells and the proteins named chaperones that controls it. Their finding may advance treatments for cancer and neurological diseases.
A mutant protein responsible for Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome (HGPS) bars large proteins from entering the nucleus, according to a study in The Journal of Cell Biology.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified a gene that, when repressed in tumor cells, puts a halt to cell growth and a range of processes needed for tumors to enlarge and spread to distant sites. The researchers hope that this so-called “master regulator” gene may be the key to developing a new treatment for tumors resistant to current drugs.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison research group has converted skin cells from people and monkeys into a cell that can form a wide variety of nervous-system cells — without passing through the do-it-all stage called the induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPSC.
Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch has efficiently created mouse models with multiple gene mutations in a matter of weeks. Because the method does not require embryonic stem cells, the approach also could allow any animal to become a model organism.
Study of tentacle-formation in a sea anemone shows how epithelial cells form elongated structures and puts the spotlight on a new model organism.
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