A gene that degrades the body’s collagen infrastructure has been shown to make fat cells fatter and expand girth.
Excess fat is stored in white adipose tissue, the primary energy depot in the body, primarily around the midsection. The gene studied by a University of Michigan team acts as a metabolic scissors, cutting through the collagen tissue matrix that holds fat in place, which allows fat cells to expand beneath the belly.
The collaborative research team, headed by
Cordoba-based company Termos La Campera S.L.L. has found a solution to increase honey production: to make beehives of polyurethane. This insulating material keeps beehives at a constant temperature and therefore bees do not have to flutter their wings in order to cool hives down in summertime, using this time to produce honey or procreate instead. This company has received 101,393 Euros from a new order of incentives for innovation and managerial development called Orden de Incentivos a la Innovació
The inventor of DNA Fingerprinting at the University of Leicester, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, is to be honoured with a prestigious international accolade later this year, it has been announced.
Sir Alec, who is Royal Society Wolfson Research Professor in the Department of Genetics, is to be awarded the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2006 by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of the discovery of the revolutionary technique.
T
A team of researchers of the University of Cadiz, headed by Carmen Estrada Cerquera, has started a project of excellence, subsidized with 166,000 euros from the Andalusian Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprise, that aims to study neural stem cells and the conditions in which they could be used in the treatment of diseases.
According to the said researcher, this project “is part of the attempt that many laboratories are currently making worldwide to get to know better the bio
Researchers have found that patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) carry a population of immune cells that overreact to Epstein-Barr virus. The virus, which causes mononucleosis and may contribute to some cancers, has long been suspected to play a role in MS. However, the mechanism linking the virus to the disease was poorly understood.
Scientists think that MS—which can cause vision problems, muscle weakness, and difficulty with coordination and balance—is a result of the im
A commercially developed vaccine has successfully protected mice and ferrets against a highly lethal avian influenza virus, according to the investigator who led the study at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The vaccine was developed by Vical Incorporated in San Diego, California.
This finding, coupled with results of previous studies that showed protection against multiple human influenza strains, suggests that such a vaccine would protect humans against multiple variants of
An international consortium of scientists, including a team from The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), is a step closer to the next generation of treatments to combat disease, after publishing a comprehensive analysis of the human and mouse transcriptomes.
A senior member of the consortium and IMB researcher Professor David Hume said transcriptome describes all of the information read from the genome by a cell at any given time.
“Essentia
Getting beaten up by the neighborhood bully so your buddy can spend time with the ladies may seem like a rough life, but that strategy not only works for some lizards, it also gives a fascinating peek into hard-wired altruism in evolutionary biology.
Side-blotched lizards spend their year on earth looking to reproduce, and their strategies have lessons about evolution. An article in the May 9 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the first genetic
Malignant glioma cells in mice die by autophagy
An engineered virus tracks down and infects the most common and deadly form of brain cancer and then kills tumor cells by forcing them to devour themselves, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The modified adenovirus homed in on malignant glioma cells in mice and induced enough self-cannibalization among the cancer cells — a
The repeated copying of a small segment of DNA in the genome of a primeval fish may have been crucial to the transition of ancient animals from sea to land, or to later key evolutionary changes in land vertebrates. The discovery is “tantalizing evidence” that copied DNA elements known as retroposons could be an important source of evolutionary innovations, says the director of the research, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Haussler.
“The big question is whether this
Humans are more susceptible to developing the eye cancer retinoblastoma than mice because, unlike humans, mice can compensate for the loss of activity of a gene critical to normal retinal development , according to results of a study by investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The study, published today in the open access journal BMC Biology, explains why humans with a defective copy of the Retinoblastoma gene RB1 are at high risk of developing cancer of the retina, or retinoblast
What do pizzas, spaghetti Bolognese and chilli con carne have in common? They all contain a vital ingredient that could help in the fight against cardiovascular disease – cooked tomatoes.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one the UK’s biggest killers, accounting for one in three deaths in the country every year. Now scientists from Liverpool John Moores University’s Nutraceutical Research Group (NRG) have been awarded over €420,000 by the European Union to investigate the health gi
This technology should help solve the puzzles of cancer, Alzheimer’s, atherosclerosis and infectious diseases.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new biotechnology that enables scientists to identify and engineer protease substrates, giving them the means of crafting pharmaceuticals to outsmart disease. Their work, authored by Patrick Daugherty, an assistant professor of Chemical Engineering, and Kevin Boulware, a PhD candidate, are published online today in the Pro
Anthrax vaccine administered in combination with a short course of antibiotics completely protected nonhuman primates from inhalational anthrax, the most lethal form of the disease, according to scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
In a collaborative study involving USAMRIID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), investigators demonstrated that postexposure vaccination can shorten the durati
More stem cells are better – expanding hematopoietic stem cells with HOXB4
Transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs, the cells that can give rise to all blood and most immune cell types) can save patients whose own hematopoietic system is defective or has been destroyed (often through radiation or chemotherapy of cancer). HSCs are very rare, and it is often hard to obtain enough of them for a successful transplant.
To overcome this limitation, Hans-Peter Kiem and
Heart rhythm disturbances are target for preventive treatment.
Using a new genomic strategy that has the power to survey the entire human genome and identify genes with common variants that contribute to complex diseases, researchers at Johns Hopkins, together with scientists from Munich, Germany, and the Framingham Heart Study, U.S.A., have identified a gene that may predispose some people to abnormal heart rhythms that lead to sudden cardiac death, a condition affecting more than
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