Skeletal muscle has a remarkable capacity to regenerate following exercise or injury and harbors two different types of adult stem cells to accomplish the job: satellite cells and adult stem cells that can be isolated as side population (SP) cells. A certain group of these stem cells is involved in muscle tissue repair, but is only triggered into the muscle cell development pathway by injury. The question then arises: what molecular factors turn these adult stem cells into muscle cells? Now Michael
Among the model systems for studying development, the zebrafish has become prized because its transparent embryo develops outside the mother’s body. The zebrafish has helped biologists identify many genes involved in embryogenesis and, because it’s a vertebrate animal, has become a valuable resource for identifying genes involved in human disease. Zebrafish are the focus of two research articles and an accompanying news feature in this issue of PLoS Biology.
Thomas Bartman and colleagues us
In an article published in the May 2004 issue of The American Naturalist, Wilte G. Zijlstra (University of Leiden), Marc J. Steigenga (University of Leiden), P. Bernhardt Koch (University of Erlangen), Bas Zwaan (University of Leiden), and Paul M. Brakefield (University of Leiden) explore the relationship between hormones and environmental adaptation in butterflies.
Hormones are crucial for the development of organisms. In the tropical butterfly, Bicyclus anynana, ecdysone affects eyespot si
Contrary to what some scientists have suggested, key intracellular particles known as ribosomes serve as mechanical matchmakers or readout devices rather than acting chemically to speed up reactions in the body the way enzymes do, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers and colleagues have discovered.
A report on the findings by Drs. Annette Sievers and Richard Wolfenden of the UNC School of Medicine appears in the new issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scien
In an unusual but useful example of cellular flip-flop, a new research study demonstrates that multiple cell types have the ability to temporarily switch into renin-secreting cells when they are needed to stabilize blood pressure. The research, published in the May issue of Developmental Cell, demonstrates that the recruited cells are direct descendants of cells that expressed renin at one time during development.
Renin is a hormone released into the blood by specialized cells in the walls
Viagra affects growth of the male sex organ of plants, by intensifying the effect of nitric oxide during plant fertilization. This discovery, made by the Plant Development team at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), in Portugal, will be published in Development, in June. The study, led by José Feijó, takes a step further in understanding fertilization in plants, a complex process but an absolutely essential one for the survival and evolution of species.
Pollen grains, which contain t
atugen AG, The Gene Silencing Company, announced today that it has demonstrated, in vivo, proof-of-concept in functional delivery of its highly stable siRNA therapeutics. In a series of repeat studies to test glucose tolerance in normal rodents, atugen’s siRNA therapy was shown to be effective in regulating blood sugar levels.
In the study, treatment with stabilized siRNA molecules (atuRNAi) through clinically-relevant i.v. infusion led to downregulation of a target which plays a significan
The family of bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB) and leprosy are notoriously sturdy. And although the diseases they cause have been held in check for the past 50 years by antibiotics, some strains are becoming increasingly resistant to existing therapy.
Now, however, a new chink has been found in the cellular armor that makes these infectious diseases difficult to treat. The discovery, reported today (May 9) in the online editions of the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology by
Plant chemicals created during the preparation of some vegetables could kill colon cancer cells in a similar way to some cancer drugs.
Scientists at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) have found that natural chemicals sabotage the uncontrolled cell division of colon cancer cells. Cancer cells are immortal because they divide indefinitely, unlike healthy cells which commit suicide at the end of their lifecycle as part of a constant process of renewal.
The plant chemical all
The main role in new findings about neovessel formation is played by a protein called tissue factor. This factor turns out to have both a stimulatory function and an inhibitory function in the generation of blood vessels. Normally these two functions neutralize each other, but in diseases like retinopathy – where unwanted blood vessels grow into the retina – this balance is disturbed. The research team shows this in an article in the May issue of Nature Medicine.
Tissue factor is found in th
A team of scientists, led by the Institute of Food Research (IFR) in the UK, has discovered an immune system malfunction that is likely to play a profound role in food allergy.
Food allergy can be life threatening, but understanding the cause has remained a challenge for science. The international team has found that two types of cells stop communicating. “Either they are not listening to each other or they stop talking”, said research leader Dr Claudio Nicoletti of the IFR. This means that
Hundreds of stretches of DNA may be so critical to life’s machinery that they have been “ultra-conserved” throughout hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Researchers have found precisely the same sequences in the genomes of humans, rats, and mice; sequences that are 95 to 99 percent identical to these can be found in the chicken and dog genomes, as well.
Most of these ultra-conserved regions do not appear to code for proteins, but may instead play a regulatory role. Evolutionary
Profos vervollständigt Bakteriophagenprotein Patentportfolio
Das Biotechnologieunternehmen Profos AG hat sich weltweit exklusive Patentrechte des britischen Institute of Food Research (IFR) und des Instituts für Mikrobiologie der Technischen Universität München zur gezielten Identifizierung und Zerstörung gram-positiver Bakterien mittels Bakteriophagenproteine gesichert. Damit hat Profos sein Patentportfolio wesentlich erweitert, das sich bisher bereits u. a. auf den Nachweis und die
The world’s oldest known modern hummingbird fossils have been discovered in Germany. The tiny skeletons are also the first modern-type hummingbird fossils ever found in the Old World. These creatures, with strikingly similar resemblances to today’s hummingbirds, lived in present-day Germany more than 30 million year ago. Although hummingbirds are currently restricted to the Americas, their long-extinct Old World “look-alikes” may have helped determine the shape of some Asian and African flo
Researchers comparing the human genome with the genomes of other species have discovered a surprising number of matching DNA sequences in a variety of vertebrate species, including the mouse, rat, dog, and chicken. The fact that these sequences have remained unchanged over long periods of evolutionary history indicates that they are biologically important, but for now their functions are largely a mystery.
Published May 6 by Science Express (the online edition of the journal Science), these
Dutch researcher Niels Cornelisse used computer models to study the electrochemical communication between cells from rat kidneys and cells from the pituitary gland of a toad species. He found many similarities in the coupling of chemical and electrical signals in these completely different cells.
Cells transmit electrical and chemical signals to other cells to coordinate the various cellular activities in the organism. Cornelisse made a mathematical model for the link between the chemical c
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