An international team of scientists led by Gregg Adams at the University of Saskatchewan has discovered that a protein in semen acts on the female brain to prompt ovulation, and is the same molecule that regulates the growth, maintenance, and survival of nerve cells.
A new study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shows a small molecule compound can generate reversible birth control in male mice.
Poxviruses, which are responsible for smallpox and other diseases, can adapt to defeat different host antiviral defenses by quickly and temporarily producing multiple copies of a gene that helps the viruses to counter host immunity.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard scientists have identified a new class of genes, dubbed CYCLOPS, that may serve as an Achilles' heel for many forms of cancer.
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues at the University of South Florida have discovered a mechanism that explains how some cancer cells “hijack” a biological process to potentially activate cell growth and the survival of cancer gene expression.
Researchers at the University of Iowa have identified a key protein that causes muscles to atrophy. The protein, Gadd45a, is responsible for 40 percent of the gene activity associated with muscle deterioration. The finding opens the door to therapies to block Gadd45a and thus to deter muscle atrophy. Results appear in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
A faulty gene linked to a rare blood vessel disorder has led investigators to discover a mechanism involved in determining the fate of possibly thousands of proteins working inside cells.
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered, for the first time in any animal species, a type of “selfish” mitochondrial DNA that is actually hurting the organism and lessening its chance to survive – and bears a strong similarity to some damage done to human cells as they age. It could provide an important new model to study human aging.
Experimenting with human prostate cancer cells and mice, cancer imaging experts at Johns Hopkins say they have developed a method for finding and killing malignant cells while sparing healthy ones.
At its most fundamental level, diabetes is a disease characterized by stress—microscopic stress that causes inflammation and the loss of insulin production in the pancreas, and system-wide stress due to the loss of that blood-sugar-regulating hormone.
Just as users of Google Earth can zoom in from space to a view of their own backyard, researchers can now navigate biological tissues from a whole embryo down to its subcellular structures thanks to recent advances in electron microscopy and image processing, as described in The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB).
Whitehead Institute researchers have created a complete catalog of genes active in the planarian eye. Several identified genes are known to have versions that play a role in the vertebrate eye, including genes involved in eye development and age-related macular degeneration and Usher syndrome, a disorder that causes progressive retinal degradation.
UCLA stem cell researchers have found for the first time a surprising and unexpected plasticity in the embryonic endothelium, the place where blood stem cells are made in early development. Scientists found that the lack of one transcription factor, a type of gene that controls cell fate by regulating other genes, allows the precursors that normally generate blood stem and progenitor cells in blood forming tissues to become something very unexpected - beating cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells.
Finding may lead to new treatments for diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases.
To foster interest in biomedical science, NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences will host an interactive Web chat about the cell on Friday, November 2, 2012, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. EDT.
Non-canonical Wnt-signaling maintains a quiescent pool of blood-forming stem cells in mouse bone marrow.
Stowers team reconciles puzzling findings relating to centromere structure.
New research has shown that a protein does something that scientists once thought impossible: It unfolds itself and refolds into a completely new shape. When it refolds, it acquires a new function – another finding researchers would not have predicted.
Why do we age, and what makes some of us live longer than others? For decades, researchers have been trying to answer these questions by elucidating the molecular causes of aging.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have discovered one reason why the cancer cells become resistant to Herceptin: They turn on a completely different pathway, one that is involved in inflammation, fueling the cancer independently of HER2.
Hundreds of mutations exist in leukemia cells at the time of diagnosis, but nearly all occur randomly as a part of normal aging and are not related to cancer, new research shows.
Scientists from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) have developed a new preparation method that renders a virus or bacterium non-infectious while preserving its immune-boosting ability after exposure to gamma radiation. A lethally irradiated vaccine was successfully tested in mice against drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria by colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and holds promise for other such deadly diseases.
Research led by Yi-Xian Qin, PhD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Director of the Orthopaedic Bioengineering Research Laboratory at Stony Brook University, demonstrated that the use of medium-intensity focused ultrasound on osteoblasts, known as bone-forming cells, stimulates the mobility of the cells and triggers calcium release, a process that promotes growth. The technique could provide a foundation for a method to develop non-pharmacologic treatments of osteoporosis, fractures, and other conditions involving bone loss. The team’s research findings are detailed online in the PLoS One article “Mechanobiological Modulation of Cytoskeleton and Calcium Influx in Osteoblastic Cells by Short-Term Focused Acoustic Radiation Force.”
For more than 20 years, doctors have been using cells from blood that remains in the placenta and umbilical cord after childbirth to treat a variety of illnesses, from cancer and immune disorders to blood and metabolic diseases.
Biologists at Tufts University have produced the first evidence that a class of proteins that make up a cell's skeleton -- tubulin proteins -- drives asymmetrical patterning across a broad spectrum of species, including plants, nematode worms, frogs, and human cells, at their earliest stages of development.
Helper cells traditionally thought to only assist killer white blood cells may be the frontline warriors when battling hepatitis A infection. These are the findings from a Nationwide Children’s Hospital study appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have isolated a new type of energy-burning fat cell in adult humans which they say may have therapeutic potential for treating obesity.
Study maps the genetic changes involved in the domestication of Aspergillus oryzae, one of the fungi used to make sake, soy sauce and miso.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified two key regulatory proteins critical to clearing away misfolded proteins that accumulate and cause the progressive, deadly neurodegeneration of Huntington’s disease (HD).
Working in mice, surgeons and scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have captured the first images of a beating heart at a resolution so detailed they can track individual immune cells swarming into the heart muscle, causing the inflammation that is so common after a heart attack or heart surgery.
Rare cells can be identified within mixed cell populations with near perfect accuracy using a detection technique devised by research teams led by Robert Wieder, MD, PhD, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School and Rajan Kumar, MD, PhD, at Genome Data Systems in Hamilton, N.J. This technique may facilitate cancer diagnosis, which often relies on the detection of rare cancerous cells in tiny amounts of biopsy tissue or fluid.
Zebrafish, popular as an aquarium fish, have an important place in research labs as a model organism for studying human diseases. They enable scientists to examine the basic biological mechanisms underlying human disorders and identify potential treatment approaches for an array of organ and systemic diseases.
A team of researchers – led by Catriona H. M. Jamieson, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Director of Stem Cell Research at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center – studied these cells in mouse models that had been transplanted with human leukemia cells. They discovered that the leukemia initiating cells which clone, or replicate, themselves most robustly activate the NOTCH1 pathway, usually in the context of a mutation.
Dietary restriction alone does not extend lifespan – at least in fruit flies. Flies, which share many genetic similarities with humans, need physical activity in order to live longer on a Spartan diet. If the same axiom holds true in humans, those practicing caloric restriction in hopes of living longer need to make sure they eat enough to avoid fatigue.
The vast majority of cells that appear to be on a one-way track to death after exposure to toxins can bounce back completely after those toxins are removed, Johns Hopkins scientists report in a new study. The finding, published in the June 15 issue of Molecular Biology of the Cell, is not only a testament to the indomitable cellular spirit, but could also offer some practical insight on how to save dying tissues after heart attacks or strokes as well as prevent cancer in cells transiently exposed to toxins.
Like detectives seeking footprints and other clues on a television “whodunit,” science can also benefit from analyzing the tracks of important players in the body’s molecular landscape. Klaus Ley, M.D., a scientist at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, has done just that and illuminated a key step in the journey of inflammation-producing immune cells. The finding provides powerful, previously unknown information about critical biological mechanisms underlying heart disease and many other disorders.
Using a new tool allowing proteins in a living cell to be manipulated in real time, researchers at Johns Hopkins have stumbled across the answer to a longstanding debate about where and how a certain protein is turned on in the cell. Reporting in the February 2012 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, scientists show that protein kinase A is also activated in the nucleus rather than inside the cell’s body, a challenge to traditional beliefs.
As the world fights obesity at the human level, a new finding at the microscopic level could help fuel that fight. The work helps explain why fat-storing cells get fatter, and burn fat slower, as obesity sets in -- and could lead to new obesity drugs.
Once considered merely a passive link between proteins that matter, Grb2 - pronounced "grab2" - actually lives up to its nickname with its controlling grip on an important cell signaling pathway, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the June 22 issue of Cell.
Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have devised an innovative boxer-like strategy, based on the serial use of two anti-cancer drugs, to deliver a one-two punch to first weaken the defenses of multiple myeloma and then deliver the final knock-out punch to win the fight.
A single protein molecule may hold the key to turning cardiac stem cells into blood vessels or muscle tissue, a finding that may lead to better ways to treat heart attack patients.
Throughout the lifecycle, injury to the body’s cells occurs naturally, as well as through trauma. Cells have the ability to repair and regenerate themselves, but a defect in the repair process can lead to cardiovascular, neurological, muscular or pulmonary diseases. Recent discoveries of key genes that control cell repair have advanced the often painstaking search for ways to enhance the repair process. A new study by researchers from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ)-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School reports that the protein MG53, previously shown to be the key initiator in the cell membrane repair process, has the potential to be used directly as a therapeutic approach to treating traumatic tissue damage. The research, published today, is featured on the cover of Science Translational Medicine.
Whitehead Institute researchers have determined and analyzed the crystal structure of a yeast Argonaute protein bound to RNA, which plays a key role in the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway that silences genes.
A molecule widely believed to fight many forms of cancer actually helps deadly thyroid tumors grow, and cancer therapies now being tested in humans might boost the activity of this newly revealed bad guy, researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida say.
In a new study published in PLoS Biology this week researchers address an urgent need to find ways to promote beneficial amyloid fiber assembly or to reverse its pathogenic assembly, at will.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have unlocked the structure of a key protein that, when sensing certain viruses and bacteria, triggers the body's immediate immune response.
Researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson have shown that senescence (aging cells which lose their ability to divide) and autophagy (self-eating or self-cannibalism) in the surrounding normal cells of a tumor are essentially two sides of the same coin, acting as “food” to fuel cancer cell growth and metastasis.
The Integrating EU-project “MitoSys” is a major, multi-national research effort that aims to deepen our understanding of how cells divide. To make this project more accessible to the public, the scientists will be joined by artists of various disciplines who complement the research process.
Studying mice and humans, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and their collaborators in Paris have identified two proteins that are required to maintain a supply of stem cells in the developing kidney. The work is a small step toward the future goal of growing kidney stem cells in the lab.
An actin-ratchet tightens the contractile ring that severs budding daughter cells from their yeast mothers.
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