Whitehead Institute researchers have found that depriving human melanoma cells of the amino acid leucine can be lethal to the cells, suggesting a possible strategy for therapeutic intervention. The cells studied have a mutated RAS/MEK pathway—the most common mutation found in the deadliest form of skin cancer.
An international research team led by Dr. Tak Mak, Director, The Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research at Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH), has discovered a new aspect of “metabolic transformation”, the process whereby tumour cells adapt and survive under conditions that would kill normal cells.
A little-studied gene known as notum plays a key role in the planarian’s regeneration decision-making process, according to Whitehead Institute scientists. At head-facing wounds, the gene acts as a dimmer switch to dampen the Wnt pathway—an signaling circuit that operates in all animals—and promote head regeneration.
Whitehead Institute researchers have found that the planarian flatworm regenerates missing tissues using pluripotent adult stem cells. Until now, scientists could not determine if the dividing cells in planarians are a mix of specialized stem cells that regenerates specific tissues, or if individual neoblasts are pluripotent and able to regenerate all tissues.
A collaborative effort by investigators at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies recently revealed just how similarly mammals and insects make critical metabolic adjustments when food availability changes, either due to environmental catastrophe or everyday changes in sleep/wake cycles. Those findings may suggest novel ways to treat metabolic conditions such as obesity and type II diabetes.
Johns Hopkins researchers have demonstrated that human liver cells derived from adult cells coaxed into an embryonic state can engraft and begin regenerating liver tissue in mice with chronic liver damage.
Shelly Peyton, a chemical engineer at UMass Amherst, is building working models of human bone, breast, liver and artery tissues to see how cells behave when they are affected by a disease such as cancer. The goal is to develop new drug therapies to fight diseases that may not require animal testing.
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have discovered a protein that guides blood vessel development and eventually might lead to a treatment to keep cancer cells from spreading.
This research shows for the first time the role of a specific protein – MAN2C1 – in prostate cancer development. The finding is significant because prostate cancer patients with increased levels of MAN2C1 appear to face more aggressive forms of the disease. This research could serve a diagnostic purpose in terms of likelihood of whether prostate cancers at early stages will progress into metastatic tumours.
Researchers with UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have discovered a way to amp up the power of killer T-cells, called CD8 cells, making them more functional for longer periods of time and boosting their ability to multiply and expand within the body to fight melanoma, a new study has found.
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have uncovered new clues about how the intestine maintains friendly relations with the 100 trillion symbiotic bacteria that normally live in the digestive tract.
Discovery of a new class of insect repellant raises the possibility of formulations that are thousands of times more effective than current repellants.
Researchers develop fruit fly model to study fat production gene
Cancer researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are helping unlock the cellular-level function of the telomerase enzyme, which is linked to the disease’s growth.
A UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher has identified the most comprehensive measurement to date of estrogen’s effect on breast cancer cells, showing for the first time how immediate and extensive the effect is.
A protein that helps the brain develop early in life can fight the mental fuzziness induced by sleep deprivation, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded Virginia Tech researchers a $2.13 million grant to develop new systems biology approaches to study cells, one of the most basic units of life.
A protein known as WWP2 appears to play a key role in tumor survival, a research team headed by a scientist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports in an advance online publication of Nature Cell Biology.
A study by researchers in Austria and the US finds evidence that the different cell types that make up organs have arisen only once during the course of evolution. The programs to develop these cells have been passed on ever since. The study which is published online by Nature Genetics has been supported by the GEN-AU Programme of the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.
Researchers may have discovered the underlying mechanism that could convert other cell types into insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells.
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have developed a new method for discerning the functions of previously uncharacterized genes and placing them in interactive, functional networks that reveal how gene products interact to bring about cellular events.
Whitehead Institute scientists report that two proteins once thought to have only supporting roles, are the true “stars” of the kinetochore assembly process in human cells. The kinetochore is vital to proper DNA distribution during cell division.
Medical therapies may be developed to recover healthy proteins that are important to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.
Take millions of puzzle pieces containing partial words and create full words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters until a book is rebuilt. That process is like sequencing a genome, says a University of Oregon biologist who has published a proof-of-principle paper on a patent-pending technology.
Dana-Farber scientists have discovered details of how cancer cells escape from tumor suppression mechanisms that normally prevent these damaged cells from multiplying. They also demonstrated a potential link between this cell proliferation control mechanism and the cognitive deficits caused by Down syndrome.
Researchers at the UCSD School of Medicine, the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco and colleagues report a game-changing advance in stem cell science: the creation of long-term, self-renewing, primitive neural precursor cells from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) that can be directed to become many types of neuron without increased risk of tumor formation.
By shedding new light on how cells migrate in the developing brain, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center also may have found a new mechanism by which other types of cells, including cancer cells, travel within the body.
Transplanting cells from healthy adult livers may work in treating a genetic liver-lung disorder that affects millions of people worldwide, according to an animal study in the April 18 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Jayanta Roy-Chowdhury, M.D., professor of medicine and of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is the study’s senior author.
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have for the first time observed the activity of a single gene in living cells. In an unprecedented study, published in the April 22 online edition of Science, Einstein scientists were able to follow, in real time, the process of gene transcription, which occurs when a gene converts its DNA information into molecules of messenger RNA (mRNA) that go on to make the protein coded by the gene.
In stark contrast to normal cells, which only divide a finite number of times before they enter into a permanent state of growth arrest or simply die, cancer cells never cease to proliferate. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have uncovered an important clue to one of the mechanisms underlying cancer cell immortality.
A discovery by Johns Hopkins scientists about how a single-celled fungus survives in low-oxygen settings may someday help humans whose immune systems are compromised by organ transplants or AIDS.
Rates of premature births have increased in recent years, affecting more than 12% of all births and making strategies for managing the associated perinatal complications an important public goal. Preterm infants are particularly at risk for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a chronic lung disease. BPD has multiple causes, and uncovering critical interactions within the immune system can lead to new approaches for treatment.
Many of the newest weapons in the war on cancer come in the form of personalized therapies that can target specific changes in an individual’s tumor. By disrupting molecular processes in tumor cells, these drugs can keep the tumor from growing and spreading. At the forefront of this work are Binghamton University researchers, Susan Bane, and Susannah Gal, who are deploying a new tool in their study of an enzyme called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL.
Squamous cell cancers, which can occur in multiple organs in the body, can originate from hair follicle stem cells, a finding that could result in new strategies to treat and potentially prevent the disease, according to a study by researchers with UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered in mice a molecular wrecking ball that powers the demolition phase of a cycle that occurs at synapses — those specialized connections between nerve cells in the brain — and whose activity appears critical for both limiting and enhancing learning and memory. The newly revealed protein, which the researchers named thorase after Thor, the Norse god of thunder, belongs to a large family of enzymes that energize not only neurological construction jobs but also deconstruction projects.
Using human kidney cells and brain tissue from adult mice, Johns Hopkins scientists have uncovered the sequence of steps that makes normally stable DNA undergo the crucial chemical changes implicated in cancers, psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. The process may also be involved in learning and memory, the researchers say.
Researchers at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre, Toronto Western Hospital have identified a cell receptor, which is responsible for cell death in the spinal cord in a condition called Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy (CSM). The findings, published today online in the journal Brain, show that when the cell receptor was blocked, nerve cells were preserved, protecting against loss of motor function.
A Kansas State University biochemist was one of the researchers on a collaborative project that took a combined computational and experimental approach to understand how protein p21 functions as a versatile regulator of cell division.
After a century of studying the causes of schizophrenia-the most persistent disabling condition among adults-the cause of the disorder remains unknown. Now induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) generated from schizophrenic patients have brought researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies a step closer to a fundamental understanding of the biological underpinnings of the disease.
Researchers from the Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center have identified three novel small molecules that interrupt a crucial cellular communication pathway that regulates many aspects of development and cancer. The finding, published in the April 12, 2011 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and featured on its cover, could provide the basis for innovative therapies for colorectal cancer and other diseases associated with aberrations in this pathway.
A Tufts University research team shows that cell death in yeast can also result from the process by which the cell repairs damage that occurs within a repeated CAG/CTG sequence. Their findings increase understanding of how diseases like Huntington's develop in humans.
Saint Louis University scientists discover how to control traffic in the lymphatic system.
MIT cancer biologists have identified a genetic change that makes lung tumors more likely to spread to other parts of the body. The findings, to be published in the April 6 online issue of Nature, offers new insight into how lung cancers metastasize and could help identify drug targets to combat metastatic tumors, which account for 90 percent of cancer deaths.
A team of scientists from Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Granada in Spain have successfully reconstructed active enzymes from four-billion-year-old extinct organisms. By measuring the properties of these enzymes, they could examine the conditions in which the extinct organisms lived. The results shed new light on how life has adapted to changes in the environment from ancient to modern Earth.
Following years of futile attempts, new research from the Monell Center demonstrates that living human taste cells can be maintained in culture for at least seven months. The findings provide scientists with a valuable tool to learn about the human sense of taste and how it functions in health and disease.
Modifying a protein from a plant much favored by science, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues have created a new type of genetic tag visible under an electron microscope, illuminating life in never-before-seen detail.
A new study reveals that a group of ancient enzymes adapted to substantial changes in ocean temperature and acidity during the last four billion years, providing evidence that life on Early Earth evolved from a much hotter, more acidic environment to the cooler, less acidic global environment today.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say a “stress response” mechanism used by normal cells to cope with harsh or demanding conditions is exploited by cancer cells, which transmit the same stress signal to surrounding cells, triggering an inflammatory response in them that can aid tumor growth.
A species of algae long known to associate with spotted salamanders has been discovered to live inside the cells of developing embryos, say scientists from the U.S. and Canada, who report their findings in this week's PNAS. This is the first known example of a eukaryotic algae living stably inside the cells of any vertebrate.
When cells find themselves in a tight spot, the cell cycle regulator p21 halts the cell cycle, buying cells time to repair the damage, or if all else fails, to initiate programmed cell death. In contrast to other stress-induced genes, which dispense with the regular transcriptional entourage, p21Cip1 still requires SKIP, a transcription elongation factor that also helps with the editing of transcripts, to be expressed, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
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