- Significant findings about protein architecture may aid in drug design, generation of nanomaterials
Researchers in Singapore are reporting this week that they have gleaned key insights into the architecture of a protein that controls iron levels in almost all organisms. Their study culminated in one of the first successful...
(Issue date: 11 April 2010)
- Variations on the genetic theme
Just like members of an orchestra are active at different times although playing the same piece of music, every cell in our body contains the same genetic sequence but expresses this differently to give rise to cells and tissues...
(Issue date: 11 April 2010)
- New method to study key targets in Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer
When designing a drug against a disease, chemists often used detailed plans of the proteins affected and against which the drugs must act. However, about a third of the proteins of our bodies have not yet been "photographed"...
(Issue date: 11 April 2010)
- Powerful New Method Allows Scientists to Probe Gene Activation
NYU Langone Medical Center researchers have developed a powerful new method to investigate the discrete steps necessary to turn on individual genes and examine how the process goes wrong in cancer and other diseases. The finding...
(Issue date: 11 April 2010)
- Scientific Breakthrough at the IRCM to cambat the HIV-1
The discovery by Dr. Éric A. Cohen’s team, director of the Human Retrovirology Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal, could potentially lead to the development of new strategies to combat the human...
(Issue date: 11 April 2010)
- Drug breakthrough in fight against neglected diseases
Scientists from the Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee - working together with partners at the University of York and the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto - have made a major breakthrough in...
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- MIT neuroscientists influence people’s moral judgements by disrupting specific brain region
MIT neuroscientists have shown they can influence people’s moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality. To make moral judgements about other people, we...
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- Caltech Scientists Uncover Structure of Key Protein in Common HIV Subgroup
Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have provided the first-ever glimpse of the structure of a key protein—gp120—found on the surface of a specific subgroup of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1....
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- Traces of early Native Americans -- in sunflower genes
New information about early Native Americans' horticultural practices comes not from hieroglyphs or other artefacts, but from a suite of four gene duplicates found in wild and domesticated sunflowers.
Indiana University...
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- Tweet: Scientists decode songbird’s genome
The zebra finch, which gets its name from the black-and-white stripes on the male finch’s throat, is the first songbird to have its genome decoded. The project was led by scientists at Washington University's Genome...
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- Biologists discover an on/off button on plants’ alarm system
Scientists connected to VIB and Ghent University have discovered how plants turn their defence mechanisms on and off. The system is apparently controlled by a key protein that the researchers have named ‘NINJA’. The discovery...
(Issue date: 05 April 2010)
- Medical Center Scientists Find Cells That Mend A Broken Heart
Humans have very limited ability to regenerate heart muscle cells, which is a key reason why heart attacks that kill cells and scar heart tissue are so dangerous. But damaged heart muscles in the amazing, highly regenerative...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- Beta-blockers 'cut cancer spread'
Blood pressure drugs may be able to reduce the ability of breast cancer to spread around the body, researchers have told a European conference. A joint UK and German study found those cancer patients taking beta-blockers had a...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- Bacteria produce oxygen even without light
Dutch researchers from the University of Nijmegen have discovered bacteria that oxidise methane without oxygen. Instead, these bacteria used nitrite, commonly available in freshwater sediments in agricultural areas. Methane is a...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- Inflammation in body fat is not only pernicious
It has been a common opinion that inflammation in adipose tissue may cause insulin resistance, and thereby type 2 diabetes. However, recent research from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet question the theory...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- Finding A Potential New Target for Treating Rheumatoid Arthritis
By enhancing the activity of immune cells that protect against runaway inflammation, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center may have found a novel therapy for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. In a new study...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- Newly Identified Proteins Critical to FA Pathway DNA Repair Function
Identification of two new proteins in the Fanconi anaemia DNA repair pathway may help explain genetic instability in people with Fanconi anaemia and how otherwise healthy people are susceptible to cancer from environmentally...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- McMaster researchers discover how cells recognise viral toxin
For many years it’s been known that the fever, achiness and other symptoms you feel during the flu are triggered by a viral molecule that travels through the body acting like a toxin. But what scientists haven’t understood is how...
(Issue date: 29 March 2010)
- SU biologists' work with 'glow-in-the-dark' sperm sheds light on sexual selection
Previously unobservable events occurring between insemination and fertilisation are the subject of a groundbreaking new article by Mollie Manier, John Belote and Scott Pitnick, professors of biology in Syracuse University’s...
(Issue date: 21 March 2010)
- Penn Researchers Identify Immune Cells That Fight Parasites May Promote Allergies and Asthma
Millions of people in both the developing and developed world may benefit from new immune-system research findings from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
The Penn Vet researchers, studying how the...
(Issue date: 21 March 2010)
