A North American business specialising in pioneering skin cancer and sun-damaged skin testing is to establish a base in the UK to continue its world-leading research.
Canada-based Genesis Genomics (GGUK), a cutting-edge biotech research corporation, is currently developing a new early warning system to aid the effective treatment of skin cancer and skin damaged by sunburn. It plans to use its new base at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne to push the commercial development o
Colorectal Cancer : The Notch Gene Plays a Key Role in Intestinal Development, Promising Therapeutic Perspectives and new Insights into Carcinogenesis
Through a long-standing collaboration, Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas and his group in Boston and Daniel Louvard’s CNRS team at the Institut Curie have discovered that the Notch gene plays a key role in intestinal development. Notch maintains the balance between stem cells and differentiated cells in the intestinal epithelium, thereby pl
Nature is a seemingly endless storehouse of interesting – and potentially life-saving – biological molecules. But tracking down and harvesting those chemicals in their natural form can be time-consuming, expensive and unreliable.
Now Salk scientists have discovered a new way of bringing “bio-prospecting” out of the rainforest and into the lab. Their findings are published in the June 16th edition of the journal Nature.
Stéphane Richard, Joseph Noel and Tomohisa Kuzuyama i
Study underscores the importance of non-coding DNA in disease determination
Today a team of scientists provides convincing evidence that the deletion of a large non-coding DNA segment on human chromosome 17 is responsible for Van Buchem disease. This genetic mutation is one of only a few disease-associated mutations discovered to date that alters a long-range transcriptional regulatory element. The study appears online in the journal Genome Research.
“Our study addre
The most common form of lung cancer may begin in a group of newly isolated lung stem cells, according to researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Working in a mouse model, the researchers isolated a novel type of lung cell that can divide into fresh copies of itself and into the two more specialized kinds of cells deep in the lung. Their experiments show that at the earliest stage of tumor development, the stem cell appears to be the first lung cells that respond to
Brown bears, squirrels, bats and frogs could hold the key to why western populations are facing an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, according to professor of medicine Peter Grant. If his theory is proven, it will “completely change the view of diabetes and its cause.”
By 2025, 300 million people worldwide will suffer from type 2 diabetes, up to 85 per cent of whom will die of related heart disease. The condition, associated with obesity, develops when the body’s fat cells secrete protei
A missing receptor molecule contributes to the growth of tumors in human ovaries. This surprisingly evident connection has now been proven by a team at the Medical University of Vienna, who published their data in the science journal Molecular Cancer Research. The team, who is supported by funding from the Austrian Science Fund FWF, also discovered the possible genetic reason why the receptor molecule, which is an important factor in regulating cell growth, is missing.
In healthy
Dutch researcher Joke van Vugt investigated extremely selfish chromosomes which ensure only male offspring in two species of parasitoid wasps. She discovered that the discriminating chromosomes in the two species are not genetically similar, even though they have exactly the same effect.
Parasitoid wasps are haplodiploid. This means that the male wasps develop from unfertilised eggs and only have one set of chromosomes, namely those of their mother. Female wasps develop from fertili
Brains are marvels of diversity: no two look the same — not even those of otherwise identical twins. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found one explanation for the puzzling variety in brain organization and function: mobile elements, pieces of DNA that can jump from one place in the genome to another, randomly changing the genetic information in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly dif
Turning on a single male-specific gene produces a female fruit fly that displays male courtship behaviors: chasing other females, tapping their abdomens and performing wing-beating love serenades. The results, published in the June 15 online edition of the journal Nature, show that a single gene can determine how females and males detect and respond differently to sexual cues.
’’In these experiments we see all the steps of the male courtship ritual you could physically expect a fe
The gene that regulates the body’s main biological clocks also may play a pivotal role in drug addiction, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.
The Clock gene not only controls the body’s circadian rhythms, including sleep and wakefulness, body temperature, hormone levels, blood pressure and heart activity, it may also be a key regulator of the brain’s reward system.
UT Southwestern researchers showed that, in mice, the Clock gene regulat
Previous human and animal studies have shown that chronic alcohol consumption can produce deficits in learning and memory. A new rodent study is the first to show that continuous drinking for as little as eight weeks can produce deficits in learning and memory that last up to 12 weeks after drinking stopped. Both human and animal studies have shown that chronic alcohol consumption can produce deficits in learning and memory. Rodent studies, for example, have shown that
Kansas State University and the Kansas Wheat Commission are spearheading the effort to create the Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, an international program focused on building the foundation for advancing agricultural research for wheat production.
The principal goal of the consortium is to obtain a publicly available, complete sequence of common (hexaploid) wheat since it is grown on more than 95 percent of the wheat-growing-area worldwide.
Bikram Gill, university d
A promising new drug candidate that may be effective against both actively dividing and slow-growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) has begun testing in humans, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, announced today. The novel antibiotic, PA-824, may shorten the time needed to treat tuberculosis (TB), a contagious disease that claims approximately two million lives worldwide each year. In partnership with the non-profit N
Two common gene variations are associated with the risk for developing chronic kidney disease, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions. One variant increases risk and the other decreases risk with a similar effect in whites, African-Americans, diabetic and non-diabetic individuals. The study, published in the June 15 edition of JAMA, is the first large-scale investigation of the role Apolipoprotein E (APOE) alleles play in
Research carried out with the participation of the University of Navarra has shown how a determinate molecule helps an important pathogen, Brucella abortus, escape destruction within the cells charged with eliminating infectious agents (macrophages). This research has been published in Nature Immunology scientific magazine.
Brucella is a model of an intracellular parasite, a category that includes other important bacteria, such as those of tuberculosis or legionelosis. Brucella penetrat
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