Scientists have known for the last decade that a link exists between wound healing and cancer. For instance, in a 1994 experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, chickens infected with a cancer virus developed tumors in areas of their body that had undergone wounding or scarring, while no tumors developed in infected areas that had not suffered wounding. However, the biological mechanism for this process hasn’t been clear.
Now, through studying muscle tissu
When humans gather in communities, they specialize and adapt. Farmers grow crops and raise animals for food based on the area’s climate and soil. Builders fashion structures engineered to keep their inhabitants warm in winter and cool in summer. Physicians tend to the sick; police and firefighters protect the public.
Communities of microorganisms, researchers are finding, exhibit very similar behavior – genetically evolving, specializing and cooperating in ways that allow them
ATM and ATR are key effectors of the cellular response to DNA damage, instructing a damaged cell to halt cell cycle progression and either initiate DNA repair processes or programmed cell death. While much research has focused on the identification of moleculaes that help transduce these signals throughout the cell, in their current paper, Dr. Lawrence Donehower and colleagues address the issue of how a cell returns to normal after DNA damage is successfully repaired.
Dr. Donehower and c
Oregon State University researchers have made significant new advances in determining the structure of all possible DNA sequences – a discovery that in one sense takes up where Watson and Crick left off, after outlining in 1953 the double-helical structure of this biological blueprint for life.
One of the fundamental problems in biochemistry is to predict the structure of a molecule from its sequence – this has been referred to as the “Holy Grail” of protein chemistry.
Two-photon imaging gives real-time video of cells in living tissue
Biologists have a new tool to track and videotape cells moving about inside living tissue. Called two-photon laser-scanning microscopy, it has revealed, for example, the dramatic difference between the random wanderings of immature T cells and the goal-oriented, beeline movement of activated T cells.
“This is the first time anybody has quantitated four-dimensional data – spatial and time data – to get a p
Major aspects of root and shoot development controlled by the plant hormone auxin are linked to regulation of gene expression by microRNAs
The plant hormone indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), commonly referred to as auxin, plays a major role in regulating plant growth and development. Auxin influences development by affecting the expression of numerous genes that control the processes of cell division and cell expansion in specific plant tissues at specific stages during the plant life
Scientists at Jefferson Medical College are using tobacco plants to produce monoclonal antibodies – tiny guided protein missiles – that can target and hunt down cancer cells. The plants promise to provide a cheaper, faster method of producing anticancer antibodies, raising hopes that the technology can one day be used in humans.
Scientists, led by Hilary Koprowski, M.D., professor of microbiology and immunology and director of the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories and th
The research group of professor Manfred Kilimann at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology has elucidated the genetic cause of a severe heart disease in newborn children. This result will be published in the June issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics this week.
Cardiomyopathies are diseases of the heart muscle tissue and often lead to heart failure. Most of them are inborn and can be caused by gene defects (mutations) affecting various proteins needed either for the
Neurotech SA announced positive results from an open-label Phase I clinical trial (03-EI-0234) of its lead product, NT-501. NT-501 uses Neurotech’s patented Encapsulated Cell Technology (ECT) as a device to deliver ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) to eyes of visually impaired patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Neurotech is a biotechnology company specializing in the development of novel therapeutics to treat diseases of the eye. The company is headquartered in Paris.
Results of
A molecular change that takes place during the progression of malignant brain tumors also occurs in breast cancer, according to a study conducted at Cedars-Sinai’s Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute. The shift appears to be part of a process that enables tumors to develop the new blood vessels they need to grow rapidly, migrate and invade other tissue.
Although the switch is evident even in an early stage of breast cancer when cells are proliferating but not infiltrating no
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed a new method for identifying specific proteins in whole cell extracts of microorganisms using traditional peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF). The key to the new method, according to the researchers, is a “shortcut” for preparing samples that makes PMF faster and more economical. By reducing the cost of protein identification, they believe PMF can become an economical tool for monitoring and evaluating the effective
Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that the presence of specific variants of genes that control clotting and the contractility, or “tone,” of blood vessels can double the ability of physicians to predict those heart surgery patients at greatest risk of bleeding after surgery.
The issue of post-operative bleeding is important, the researchers said, because patients who suffer such episodes have increased rates of additional medical problems and even deat
Members of the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) family of proteins play many regulatory roles in several tissues. FGF-21 is a novel member of the FGF family, but its biological role was not known. In a study appearing online on May 2 in advance of the print publication of the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Alexei Kharitonenkov and colleagues from Lilly Research Laboratories show that FGF-21 may be a new therapeutic treatment for Diabetes Mellitus.
The researchers show th
A study published in the May issue of Developmental Cell identifies specific genes that appear to be key players in the regulation of human-blood stem cells. This work is the first to validate gene expression analysis in human stem cells with functional experiments. The findings also suggest that changes in the expression of genes associated with universal cell signaling pathways can have a substantial impact on human stem cell behavior.
Formation and ongoing maintenance of bl
Although they may look small and unassuming, planarian worms are famous in the scientific world for their extraordinary ability to regenerate body parts after injury. Even a small piece cut off a planarian can reorganize and regenerate to form a whole new worm. Now, scientists have completed the first systematic investigation of gene function in planarians, opening the door to using genetic analysis to decipher how regeneration works in this enigmatic animal. The research, published in the May i
Could lead to strategies to regenerate tissue after heart attack
In the best documented effort to date, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have successfully induced adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply.
Heart-muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, were previously considered incapable of replicating in mammals after birth, which is why heart attack is such a problem: once killed, heart
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