Findings suggest need to expand targets of new treatments
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have demonstrated in a living organism that cancers may cause surrounding supportive cells to evolve and ultimately promote cancer growth.
The new research offers what is believed to be the first evidence that mutations within cancer cells can signal surrounding tissue cells to alter their molecular composition in ways that promote tumor growth and proliferatio
Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGMO) today announced that data from its program to develop a ZFP Therapeutic(TM) for HIV/AIDS were presented at the 45th Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Washington, DC. The study represents the first demonstration that cells can be made resistant to HIV infection by treatment with Sangamo’s proprietary zinc finger DNA-binding protein nucleases (ZFNTM) designed to specifically disrupt the CCR5 gene.
The sweet taste of temperature
Why does a beer taste better if it comes from the fridge and does a warm beer taste bitter? Why is red Bordeaux wine best drunk at room temperature? And what causes that unique taste sensation of ice cream? Researchers from the Physiology section of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven, Belgium) have discovered, together with their Japanese and American colleagues, how the temperature sensitivity of our sense of taste works. Today, they pu
Scientists at the University of York used a ‘protein time capsule’ to confirm the earliest record of human activity in Northern Europe.
A team of bio-archaeologists from York were able to provide the final piece of scientific evidence which confirmed that primitive stone tools discovered in East Anglia dated back around 700,000 years – 200,000 years earlier than any other traces of human colonisation of northern latitudes.
Dr Kirsty Penkman and Dr Matthew Collins were p
Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC), Norwich, UK[1], today report a breakthrough in understanding how plant cells control the direction of their growth. The report, in the international scientific journal Nature[2], describes a gene (called SCN1) which controls the activity of an enzyme that is critical to cell growth. The researchers have found that SCN1 keeps cell growth in check.
“This is an exciting discovery because the direction of cell growth is very important in de
Through the Human Genome Project, the HapMap Project and other efforts, we are beginning to identify genes that are modified in some diseases. More difficult to measure and identify are the regulatory regions in DNA – the ‘managers’ of genes – that control gene activity and might be important in causing disease.
Today, a team led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, together with colleagues in the USA and Switzerland, provide a measure of just how important regulatory region var
The circulation of cancer cells through the blood vessels is often the cause of metastasis. These cancer cells contaminate normal cells and the pathology spreads throughout the body. Metastasis is the main risk in cancers. In order to prevent this process from occurring, a team from the Chemistry Faculty at the Donostia-San Sebastián campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) analysed the connections between cancer and normal cells.
Concretely, the UPV-EHU analysed
Elena Rugarli and colleagues from the National Neurological Institute in Milan have used gene therapy to save sensory and skeletal muscle nerve fibers from degeneration in mice with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP). This strategy, reported online on December 15 in advance of print publication in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, holds promise for many other disorders characterized by nerve degeneration due to loss of function of a known gene.
Hereditary sp
With help from a common aquarium pet and a recently released online database of human genetic variation, a collaborative team of Penn State researchers has found what could be the most important skin color gene identified to date.
The team, led by cancer geneticist Keith Cheng, M.D., Ph.D., a Jake Gittlen Cancer Research Foundation researcher in the Penn State Cancer Institute, at Penn State College of Medicine, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, in collaboration with Univ
New research by a team of scientists in France and the United States has identified both the bacterial and host receptor proteins that enable Rickettsia conorii, the Mediterranean spotted fever pathogen to enter cells. Understanding how this bacterium interacts with the cells of its host could lead to new therapeutic strategies for diseases caused by related pathogens, including Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus.
Pascale Cossart, an HHMI international research scholar at
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have demonstrated that Langerhans cells in the skin, which had been thought to alert the immune system to pathogens, instead dampen the skin’s reaction to infection and inflammation.
This has the potential to significantly alter understanding of the mechanisms underlying many skin disorders such as psoriasis, lupus and skin cancer.
Dendritic cells are found throughout the body and are extremely efficient at alerting the immune syst
A team of researchers led by Université Laval and The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has discovered a protein that plays a major role in neuropathic pain. This discovery, published in the December 16 issue of Nature, paves the way for the development of new diagnostics and treatments for chronic pain.
Neuropathic pain is a common and severely disabling state that affects millions of people worldwide. Many people suffering from neuropathic pain appear normal, but are
Measurements of the ion-current through the open state of a membrane-protein’s ion channel have allowed scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to obtain a detailed picture of the effect of the protein microenvironment on the affinity of ionizable amino-acid residues for protons.
The findings, reported in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, are expected to be welcome news for chemists and biophysicists, both experimentalists and theoreticians, because they have prev
A Christian legend has it that the mistletoe was damned by God to a parasite’s life, because Christ’s cross was made out of its wood. It was hold sacred by ancient Teutons as it symbolised the continuity of life and fertility because of living between heaven and earth, and staying green even in winter. From this belief the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas still dates back. Druids (and who does not know Miraculix in the world-famous comic series “Asterix”!?) cut them
Proteins are large molecular chains that move around cells carrying vital information on the activity of the organism. The role of each protein depends largely on the form it takes, but the proteins occasionally lose this form when they collide and bind with other proteins. They aggregate, and lose their function, growing continuously to form what are known as amyloid fibres. This causes neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and forms of spongiform encephalopathy, such as ma
Drs. Elisavet Maniataki and Zissimos Mourelatos (UPENN School of Medicine) report on the pathway of human RISC assembly from pre-microRNAs (miRNAs), highlighting important differences from the siRNA-fueled RISC assembly pathway in Drosophila.
The authors identified a protein complex between Dicer and Argo2 – the “microRNA loading complex” (miRLC) – that lacks miRNAs. Without a requirement for ATP, miRLC catalyzes RISC assembly and disassembly to release the miRNP.
“This study dem
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