Saint Louis University influenza researcher comments in Nov. 24 issue
An article by Robert Belshe, M.D., of Saint Louis University School of Medicine in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine reviews recent “spectacular achievements of contemporary molecular biology” that hold great importance as the world prepares for a possible flu pandemic.
These achievements, including a recent genetic sequencing and recreation of the virus from the 1918 flu pandemic, “m
Using Petri dishes full of genetically engineered E. coli instead of photo paper, students at The University of Texas at Austin and UCSF successfully created the first-ever bacterial photographs.
Their work is published in this week’s issue of Nature (Nov. 24, 2005), which is devoted entirely to the emerging field of synthetic biology.
The students produced the innovative bacterial images and a bacterial camera as part of MIT’s intercollegiate Genetically Eng
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the German Cancer Research Institute have shown how protein synthesis is targeted to certain regions of a cell–a process crucial for the cellular motility that governs nerve growth, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Their study appears in the November 24 issue of the journal Nature.
Led by Drs. Robert Singer and Dr Stefan Huettelmaier, the research team focused on migrating fibroblast cells important in wound healin
“You can eat your relatives but not your friends,” could be the off-kilter credo of a tiny marine invertebrate called a sea squirt that can physically merge with, and parasitize, its own kin. The trigger for this unseemly behavior has now been traced to a single gene, isolated by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. That gene also points to a common origin with the vertebrate immune system, far back in animal evolution, potentially shedding light on the development of our o
Genetic clues guide customized treatment for neuroblastoma
A new study reports that a loss of genes on chromosome 1 or chromosome 11 raises the risk of death from the children’s cancer neuroblastoma, even when other indicators seem to point to a lower-risk form of the disease. This research finding will help guide physicians to the most appropriate treatment for the cancer, which strikes the peripheral nervous system. The approach used may also be applied to customizing care
Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that cells co-opted the machinery that usually repairs broken strands of DNA to protect the integrity of chromosomes. This finding solves for the first time an important question that has long puzzled scientists.
The natural ends of chromosomes look just like broken strands of DNA that a cell’s repair machinery is designed to fix. But mending chromosome ends, or telomeres, would set the stage for the developmen
With national attention focused on the avian flu threat, other infections that could be transmitted from animals to people are also coming under scrutiny. People with work exposure to pigs, such as farmers, veterinarians and meat processing workers, are at heightened risk of contracting swine influenza, according to a study in the Jan. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.
Pigs’ physical makeup allows them to contract—and to spread—influenza viruses to and fr
Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh and Louisiana State University report findings in Journal of Clinical Investigation
The development of effective vaccines for people with compromised immune systems may be feasible after all, according to a team of researchers, who demonstrated their approach could protect against pneumocystis pneumonia in mice lacking the same population of immune cells that HIV destroys in humans. The vaccine platform dev
A Queen’s University study of fruit flies that may revolutionize the way birth defects are studied has identified the genes affected by a widely prescribed drug known to cause birth defects.
Methotrexate (MTX), a popular cancer-fighting drug also used to treat psoriasis, ectopic pregnancies, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, lasts a long time in the body and causes birth defects in children from women who have it in their systems. The study of the drug’s effect on fruit
One of the key controllers of neural development seems to depend on a simple cellular decision–whether to divide perpendicularly or in parallel to the embryonic structure called the neuroepithelium. Nevertheless, such orientation is critical, and understanding its machinery could help neuroscientists learn to control the division of adult neural stem cells to regenerate neural tissues.
Researchers know that during the earliest embryonic brain development, neural stem cells divid
Study finds AKT blocks cancer cell motility; paradoxical discovery raises questions in developing cancer inhibitor therapies
In investigating the molecular mechanisms of cancer cell motility – the unique property that enables cancer to spread from its primary origin to other parts of the body – researchers have uncovered a surprising role for the AKT/PKB (protein kinase B) enzyme, providing important new insights into cancer metastasis and suggesting that current efforts to deve
Using a nuclear magnetic resonance technique, University of Illinois at Chicago chemists have obtained the first molecular-level images of precursors of bundled fibrils that form the brain plaques seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Untangling the molecular structure of these pre-fibril forms, which may be the key neurotoxins in Alzheimer’s, may help identify targets for new drugs to combat many neurodegenerative diseases.
Microscopic bundled fibrils made of p
Stem cells may cause some forms of bone cancer, University of Florida scientists report.
The researchers are the first to identify a population of cells with characteristics of adult and embryonic stem cells in cultures derived from biopsies of patients’ bone tumors. They describe their findings in this month’s issue of the medical journal Neoplasia.
“We’re saying the cell of origin of these tumors may be very, very primitive,” said C. Parker Gibbs, M.D., an
Two proteins involved in the process that controls plant growth may help explain why human cells reject chemotherapy drugs, according to an international team of scientists.
Researchers from Purdue University and Kyoto University in Japan have shown for the first time that proteins similar to multi-drug resistant proteins in humans move a plant growth hormone into cells, said Purdue plant cell biologist Angus Murphy. Because plant proteins called P-glycoproteins (PGPs) are closel
The most comprehensive analysis ever performed of the genetic relationships among all the major groups of snakes, lizards, and other scaly reptiles has resulted in a radical reorganization of the family tree of these animals, requiring new names for many of the tree’s new branches. The research, reported in the current issue of the journal C. R. Biologies, was performed by two biologists working at Penn State University: S. Blair Hedges, professor of biology, and Nicolas Vidal, a postdoctoral f
Fruit flies can live significantly longer, and remain healthy, when activity of the fly version of the tumor-suppressing protein p53 is reduced in nerve cells. Published in Current Biology, the results shed important new light on the role this “protector of the genome” plays in aging and point to p53 as a viable target for anti-aging drugs.
The p53 gene plays a critical role in the body. It protects human cells by producing a protein that triggers apoptosis, or cell suicide, wh
Feedback
