A team of researchers from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Neuroscience at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has discovered that tetanus toxin, which causes tetanus, could be extremely useful as a therapy against psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety and anorexia, and to slow the progress of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Tetanus toxin is a neurotoxin belonging to the same family as botulinum neuro
By devising a novel way to package the genome of a common human tumor virus — the virus that causes common warts, genital warts and that is implicated in prevalent cancers — scientists have paved the way for making the pathogen far more accessible to biomedical science.
The work, reported today (June 13) in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), promises to accelerate the search for an effective cancer vaccine and treatments for cervic
Discovery pinpoints the true ’stem cell’
Regenerative medicine scientists at the University of Florida’s McKnight Brain Institute have created a system in rodent models that for the first time duplicates neurogenesis — the process of generating new brain cells — in a dish.
Writing in today’s (June 13) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe a cell culture method that holds the promise of producing a limitless supply o
A team of researchers from Mexico and the United States has identified a new family of catfish in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The paper detailing the discovery has been published in Zootaxa, an online scientific journal.
They’ve named the new family Lacantuniidae and named the species Lacantunia enigmatica. It becomes the 37th family of catfishes, a diverse group of fish found around the world.
Discovery of new families of living vertebrates is rare; in ichthyolog
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 regul
The mysterious, highly infectious prions, which cause the severe destruction of the brain that characterizes “mad cow disease” and several human brain degenerative disorders, can be rendered harmless in the laboratory by a slight alternation of the three-dimensional conformation or shape of the prion protein’s structure.
The discovery, which opens up new directions for researchers studying the currently untreatable prion diseases in humans and animals, is reported in this we
Mrinal Shah develops technology to construct biosensors more quickly
A University of Houston student has made an award-winning breakthrough in biosensors that could help bioterrorism researchers in their ability to quickly and accurately detect toxic biological agents.
Mrinal Shah, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at UH, has developed new methods in the use of biosensors that could provide one of the first steps in developing a protein-based biosensor that wo
Researchers at Yale have identified a gene that regulates the major immune response in plants, programmed cell death (PCD), according to a recent report in the journal Cell.
To protect themselves from viruses, plants create a zone of dead cells around an infection site that prevents the infection from spreading. Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, associate professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and his colleagues discovered how the plants keep from killin
The laws of physics combine with the mutual attraction of two proteins to create the honeycomb pattern of fruit fly eyes, say molecular biologists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. This same combination of forces forms the delicate filtering structures of the mammalian kidney.
The findings, reported in the June issue of Developmental Cell, provide a new understanding of how individual cells find their niche during organ development. They also mean that t
One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor off the coast of Central California. After analyzing hundreds of hours of deep-sea video, Bruce Robison and his colleagues found that “sinkers”—the cast-off mucus nets of small midwater animals called larvacea
A cone snail toxin discovered by Melbourne researchers has proven to have great potential for easing pain and could provide an improved treatment for neuropathic pain associated with diabetes.
Melbourne based company Metabolic Pharmaceuticals Limited recently announced successful results in preclinical trials of the toxin. The company will begin clinical trials in humans this month to firstly test the safety of the toxin in normal males, and later its effectiveness in treating th
Everyone knows that stem cells are controversial. Many people know that stem cells can grow into virtually any cell type found in the body, from a red blood cell to a muscle cell to a brain cell. But no one really knows why stem cells continue to divide and renew themselves long after the point where other cells stop dividing.
Now scientists at Northwestern University and the University of Washington offer one of the first clues as to why stem cells ignore stop signs in the c
Using targeted RNA interference, or RNAi libraries, researchers at Harvard Medical School describe the first large-scale classification of kinase and phosphatase gene families on the basis of their role in apoptosis and cell survival. This study appears in the June issue of Nature Cell Biology.
Jeffrey MacKeigan, former HMS research fellow in cell biology now working at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and colleagues utilized RNAi to systematically screen the kinase a
When it comes to the deadly skin cancer melanoma, studying functional tissue rather than cell lines may better provide insight into the disease’s development, according to new research from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Though multiple genetic alterations are associated with melanoma development, scientists have not been able to establish a direct causal link between these alterations and human cancer growth.
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how a small molecule of RNA called microRNA – a chemical cousin of DNA – helps fine tune the production of a key protein involved in the early development of heart muscle.
The findings, available in the online edition of the journal Nature, may aid scientists in their understanding of how a progenitor cell, or stem cell, decides to become a heart cell, as well as offer researchers a way to predict how other microRN
Plasso Technology Ltd has been awarded a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) grant by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to develop a sugar array.
Plasso provides novel solutions for the immobilisation and presentation of biomolecules for use in a range of biological assays. One class of biological molecule that has proven particularly difficult to immobilise in this regard is glycosaminoglycans, (GAGs). GAGs are found on the surface of all c
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