In 1984, HARBOR BRANCH scientists exploring deep waters off the Bahamas in one of the institution’s Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles discovered a small piece of sponge that harbored a chemical with a remarkable ability to kill cancer cells in laboratory tests. Despite almost two decades of searching, though, the group was never able to find enough of the sponge to fully explore its potential. But now that process can finally begin because, thanks to some creative detective work, the team has found
Cassowaries’ low-frequency sounds may give insight into dinosaur communications
A family of huge forest birds living in the dense jungles of Papua New Guinea emit low-frequency calls deeper than virtually all other bird species, possibly to communicate through thick forest foliage, according to a study published by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Published in the recent issue of the scientific journal The Auk, the study says that three species of cassowaries
Sometimes familiarity does not breed contempt: A Cornell University behavioral scientist has found that female wolf spiders prefer mates that are comfortably familiar.
However, the researcher has discovered, a male wolf spider unlucky enough to attempt to mate with an unfamiliar female probably is doomed to be killed and eaten by the female.
“Finding this behavior is really surprising. Social experience influences mate choice,” says Eileen Hebets, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher
Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered a key step in the body’s regulation of melatonin, a major sleep-related chemical in the brain. In the advance online section of Nature Structural Biology, the research team reports finding the switch that causes destruction of the enzyme that makes melatonin — no enzyme, no melatonin.
Melatonin levels are high at night and low during the day. Even at night, melatonin disappears after exposure to bright light, a response that likely contributes
An insidious fuzzy gray mold that often coats refrigerated strawberries and many other plants during growing and storage may be prevented by a gene identified by a Purdue University researcher.
The mold is caused by a fungus, Botrytis cinerea, that often enters plant tissue through wounded or dead areas such as wilted petals, bruised fruit or at the site of pruning. In the November issue of the journal The Plant Cell, Purdue plant molecular biologist Tesfaye Mengiste and his colleagues at Sy
Home testing of saliva to measure personal hormone levels is gaining popularity, with dozens of companies offering do-it-yourself, mail-in test kits. Battelle scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory envision a day when it may be nearly as easy to detect chemical exposure or even nerve gas poisoning — simply by analyzing a victim’s saliva. And the results would be almost immediate.
Using sophisticated mass spectrometry equipment at PNNL, researchers hav
Breast cancer patients have a lower chance of long-term survival if they carry an inherited mutation in the BRCA1 gene, according to research published in Breast Cancer Research this week. However, the poor prognosis associated with the mutated gene is mitigated by chemotherapy.
The breast cancer susceptibility genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, were identified over eight years ago, but the best way of treating women who develop hereditary breast cancer associated with mutations in these genes is still
Cumbre Inc. and University of Wisconsin-Madison research collaborator publish data on a new class of bacterial RNA polymerase inhibitor
Cumbre Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, announced today the publication of a research paper in the October 24, 2003 issue of Science entitled “A new class of bacterial RNA polymerase inhibitor affects nucleotide addition.” The paper describes the identification and characterization of the novel “CBR703” class of inhibitors through com
Researchers have found that a promising new class of antibacterial chemicals inhibits one of the most fundamental processes of life – a cell’s ability to express genetic material. Knowing exactly how these chemicals keep bacterial cells in check can help scientists make more effective antibiotics.
Like many bacterial inhibitors, this new class of compounds – called the CBR703 series – inhibits RNA polymerase, the key enzyme in gene expression. However, the unique mechanism that these compou
An estimated 5,000 previously unknown ocean fish species and hundreds of thousands of other marine life forms are yet to be discovered, according to scientists engaged in a massive global scientific collaboration to identify and catalog life in the oceans.
The new marine fish species, being identified at an average rate of 160 per year (roughly three new species per week since year 2000), are being catalogued and mapped by the Census of Marine Life (CoML), an unprecedented cooperativ
Predisposition to many common diseases – among which cancer, cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, asthma, etc. – is said to be a multifactor phenomenon as it results from numerous genes as well as environmental factors. Identifying such predisposition genes is one of the major challenges in modern genetics and could contribute to establishing new preventive medicine patterns and developing new specific drugs.
However, the identification of predisposition genes appeared to be extremely diffic
Understanding cancer
Mayo Clinic researchers are the first to describe what goes wrong during the growth cycle of certain cells that can lead to inherited forms of breast cancer. Knowing the nature of this biochemical modification is a first step to designing drugs that can correct it to stop cancer.
The Mayo Clinic research finding appears in today’s issue of the journal Science. It is important because it solves an aspect of a mystery that cancer researchers worldwide have
Walruses are ’right-flippered’, according to research published this week in BMC Ecology. The first study of walrus feeding behaviour in the wild showed that the animals preferentially use their right flipper to remove sediment from buried food. This is the first time that any aquatic animal has been shown to prefer using one flipper to the other when foraging. Direct observations of the underwater behaviour of free-living marine mammals are rare, especially if the animals are dang
Scientists here have found that a protein in the retrovirus known as human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) can cause immune cells to divide and proliferate, helping the virus spread through the body.
The protein, known as p12, was formerly thought to be unimportant during infection, causing scientists to regard it as a nonessential “accessory gene.”
This new study, however, shows that the protein forces infected cells to produce interleukin 2 (IL-2), a substance that stimu
Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered that the eye’s vision-producing rods and cones cannot tell the difference between their respective light-detecting molecules. The findings appeared in a recent issue of Nature.
At the heart of the researchers’ side-by-side comparison is the quest to solve a fundamental mystery of vision: how rods and cones have such different sensitivities to light despite using very similar processes to detect it.
Rods function in near darkness,
By using a laser microscope to spy on individual nerve cells in living mice, researchers have discovered that neurons’ wiring remain largely stable, providing a solid scaffold to accommodate the challenges in their environment. Specifically, the scientists found that the neuronal branches called “dendrites” remain largely unchanged in the highly active olfactory processing region of the mouse brain. Such evidence suggest that dendrites in the adult brain form a stable background even in the face
Feedback
