Plants native to the Mojave Desert may one day help provide relief to millions of people who suffer from two prominent tropical diseases.
Scientists at Ohio State University found that extracts of the dotted dalea (Psorothamnus polydenius) and the Mojave dalea (Psorothamnus arborescens) can kill the parasites, which are a kind of protozoa that cause the diseases leishmaniasis and African sleeping sickness. While both diseases are rare in North America, they are prevalent in dozen
To understand the formation of the brain-clogging deposits that cause such disorders as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, Duke University chemists have figured out how to capture and “micromanipulate” the single molecular building blocks of the deposits.
Their aim is to understand the detailed assembly process for the toxic protein called amyloid plaque. Such basic understanding, they said, could lead to approaches to preventing plaque formation.
The resear
The cells that line the arteries are able to produce C-reactive protein, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the April issue of American Journal of Pathology.
C-reactive protein is a risk marker for heart disease and is known to be produced in the liver, but UC Davis School of Medicine researchers Ishwarlal Jialal and Sridevi Devaraj found that endothelial cells also produce C-reactive protein, a key finding that helps to explain how
RNA loops and knots guide genetic modifications
University of Connecticut Health Center scientist, Robert Reenan, has uncovered new rules of RNA recoding–a genetic editing method cells use to expand the number of proteins assembled from a single DNA code. According to his work, the shape a particular RNA adopts solely determines how editing enzymes modify the information molecule inside cells. The study may help explain the remarkable adaptability and evolution of animal nervou
Although most people think of bats as stealthy mammals that flit about in the night sky, at least one species has evolved a terrestrial trot never before seen in bats, according to a recent Cornell University study.
It’s known that the common vampire bats of Central and South America behave much more like four-legged terrestrial mammals, in that they like to walk around on the ground; other bat species fumble helplessly when left to walk. But researchers in Cornell’s C
The oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus), apart from reducing cholesterol and having anticancerogenic properties, is characterised for its capacity for breaking down cellulose. Finding out which genes are responsible for this activity – the reason why the fungus is sometimes used as a decontaminating agent, was the aim of the PhD thesis by Arantza Eizmendi Goikoetxea, which she defended at the Public University of Navarre with the title, Molecular Characterisation of a family of genes of cell
A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning surprise. Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation. The analysis, performed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, has withstood thorough testing so that confide
Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute have found evidence in laboratory studies that the immune system may be able to recognize methamphetamine and boost tolerance to the drug through an unusual vaccine-like mechanism. Their finding, if confirmed in human studies, could help explain why chronic users go on long binges with the illicit drug, also known as speed. The study could lead to new treatments for the drug’s addiction, they say.
Recent studies by others have docume
A molecule that usually protects the body’s infection-fighting cells might also contribute to fatty buildups that coat arteries and lead to heart disease, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.
The molecule, called apoptosis inhibitor of macrophage or AIM, inhibits cell death in macrophages, which circulate in the bloodstream and help the body fend off infection and foreign substances. The AIM-protected macrophages go on to encourage buildup of fats on the i
Greater levels of selenium, vitamin E and the tomato nutrient lycopene have been shown to reduce prostate cancer in one out of every four Caucasian males — those who inherit a specific genetic variation that’s particularly sensitive to oxidative stress.
Conversely, if carriers of this genetic variant have low levels of these vitamins and minerals, their risk of aggressive prostate increases substantially, as great as 10-fold, over their cohorts who maintain higher levels of t
Ohio – Researchers at Ohio State University have developed a method for mass-producing embryonic stem cells.
That’s important because traditional laboratory methods used to grow these cells are costly and don’t produce cells fast enough to respond to increasing demands for human embryonic stem cells, said Shang-Tian Yang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University.
Federal rules forbid the federal funding of research on hum
Developing chemical sensors that can be placed in the bloodstream or under the skin to continuously monitor oxygen, acidity (pH), or glucose levels is a major challenge for analytical chemists and biomedical engineers. The problem is, the body responds to these foreign objects in ways that interfere with their ability to accurately measure blood chemistry. In the bloodstream, clots form on the surface of implanted sensors or blood vessels contract around them. Sensors implanted under the skin may
University of Michigan researchers have developed a faster, more efficient way to produce a wide variety of nanoparticle drug delivery systems, using DNA molecules to bind the particles together.
Nanometer-scaled dendrimers can be assembled in many configurations by using attached lengths of single-stranded DNA molecules, which naturally bind to other DNA strands in a highly specific fashion. “With this approach, you can target a wide variety of molecules—drugs, contrast agents—
When you grab a piece of food and put it in your mouth, when you smile in response to the smile of a passerby or squint and grimace in anger, the complex pattern of movements that you make may be hard-wired into your brain.
Scientists have long known that many of the behaviors of lower organisms are innate. In the insect world, for example, instinctive behaviors predominate. Birds have a larger repertoire of fixed behaviors than dogs. In primates, voluntary or learned behavior pred
Biologists identify chemicals affecting plant growth in response to gravity
A team of biologists from the University of California, Riverside has used chemical genomics to identify novel compounds that affect the ability of plants to alter their direction of growth in response to gravity, a phenomenon known as gravitropism.
The researchers screened a library of 10,000 small molecules, the practice is known as chemical genomics, to identify those that could positively or n
Eleven leading biomedical organizations announced today the formation of a unique $18M, three-year public-private consortium to create a comprehensive library of gene inhibitors to be made available to the entire scientific community. Based on the method of RNA interference (RNAi), this library will give scientists worldwide the tools to knock down expression of virtually all human and mouse genes, accelerating the growth of basic knowledge of gene function in normal physiology and disease.
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