Dr. Wesley Sundquist, professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, will present at the Experimental Biology 2003 meeting in San Diego on his work in elucidating how HIV is manufactured and assembled in the cell.
The raison d’être of a virus such as HIV, if a non-living thing can be said to have one, is to turn a host cell into a factory that churns out virus copies and releases them to infect other cells. Dr. Sundquist’s research has focused on discovering the mechanisms u
Clemson researcher part of discovery team
Science, a leading international research journal, reports today that a team of scientists, including Clemson University plant biochemist Brandon Moore, has found sugars not only serve as fuel for plants but also as signal compounds to genes critical to cell development and plant growth.
The research is considered to be groundbreaking, providing insights into the fundamental importance sugars play in both plants and animals. Scientis
Mineral salts are essential for living organisms. To be precise, it is from these, living cells get their basic components, the ions. Common salt, for example, contains chloride and sodium ions which the cell uses to establish and maintain electrochemical balance with the environment.
In order to achieve sodium equilibrium in animal cells, for example, the external sodium concentration has to be ten times greater than the internal one. It is precisely due to this difference in concentration
The major features of evolution are pre-determined and not only the result of random or accidental processes, two leading European scientists propose in a paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology .
Professor Robert Williams of the University of Oxford and Professor Fraústo da Silva of the Instituto Superior Tecnico of Lisbon, challenge the Darwinist idea that the overall course of evolution random and purposeless, and that the appearance of organisms with increasing complexity
Nanowires and carbon nanotubes, each with their pluses and minuses, are advertised as the next-generation building blocks for electronic circuits a thousand times smaller than today’s semiconductor circuits.
Peidong Yang, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist, has now fabricated a new type of nanotube, made of gallium nitride, that, he says, “captures some of the great properties from nanowires and carbon nanotubes, and eliminates the not-so-good characteristics of both.
“E
Scientists at the University of Arizona have discovered a critical cold-tolerance gene in Arabidopsis. As published in the April 15th issue of Genes & Development, the identification of ICE1 by Dr. Jian-Kang Zhu and colleagues holds promising implications for the improvement of cold tolerance in agriculturally important crops.
Cold temperature is one of the major factors affecting crop yield in temperate climates, with the farming industry loosing billions of dollars each year to freezing t
UCLA graduate student Jeffrey Riffell and UCLA biology professor Richard Zimmer report the first experimental test on the role of small-scale physics as it influences the interactions between sperm and egg, and the consequences for fertilization, at the annual conference of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences in Sarasota, Fla., April 10.
“The physics of fluid motion has a profound consequence on the ability of sperm to navigate and find an egg, and therefore on fertilization,” Zimmer
Canadian-led project generates database with medical annotation available to the public
Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) have compiled the complete DNA sequence of human chromosome 7 and decoded nearly all of the genes on this medically important portion of the human genome. The research, which involved an international collaboration of 90 scientists from 10 countries, publishes in the online version of the scientific journal Science on April 10, 2003.
Two
Inactivating a protein that helps regulate the proliferation of vascular cells increases the chance of developing atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart disease, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered.
Vascular vessels endure constant pounding and considerable stresses associated with blood flow. Vascular smooth muscle cells play an important role in the development of blood vessels, providing structural integrity and the ability to dilate and constrict. The
Stanford University Medical Center researchers have identified a protein responsible for ensuring correct skull growth in newborn mice. The protein, called Noggin, inhibits fusion of bony plates in the skull until developmentally appropriate. The scientists hope that Noggin may one day replace surgery as a way to treat premature skull fusion in infants.
“About 1 in 2,000 children has growth plates in their skull that fuse prematurely,” said Michael Longaker, MD. “The brain is rapidly expand
Scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and their colleagues have unraveled some of the fundamental mysteries about the genetic mechanisms that endow the immune system with its life-saving ability to generate specialized antibodies.
Without genetic fine-tuning, antibodies would be relatively ineffective in finding a good match on the surface of viruses, parasites, and other potentially dangerous foreign pathogens. The findings also reveal the workings of a gene mutation process
The sex of newborns is dictated by the X and Y chromosomes – girls are XX whereas boys are XY. However, new research from Northwestern University has shown that normal testis formation depends on two genes — the so-called male-determining SRY gene, found on the Y chromosome 10 years ago, and a gene called Dax1 on the X (female) chromosome.
Based on the findings of the Northwestern study, published in the May online Nature Genetics, it now appears that Dax1 is required at several points in embr
Building on their 2001 discovery of a cellular doorway used by anthrax toxin to enter cells, University of Wisconsin Medical School researchers have found a second anthrax toxin doorway, or receptor. The finding could offer new clues to preventing the toxin’s entrance into cells.
The researchers also have found that when they isolated a specific segment of the receptor in the laboratory, they could use it as a decoy to lure anthrax toxin away from the real cell receptors, preventing much o
Since Charles Darwin heralded evolution more than 150 years ago, scientists have sought to better understand when and how the vast variety of plants today diverged from common ancestors.
A new University of Georgia study, just published in Nature, demonstrates key events in plant evolution. It allows scientists to infer what the gene order may have looked like in a common ancestor of higher plants. And it shows one way plants may have differentiated from their ancestors and each other.
The desire for healthy-looking skin has existed throughout the centuries and has often led humanity to flowers and other plants in search of assistance. COSMACTIVE treads the same path, but uses the latest in biotechnology to identify and extract the active ingredients from a wide range of plants.
Under the umbrella of the EUREKA project COSMACTIVE, the French research company Greentech has developed a new way of identifying and selecting active ingredients that gives it, and its Spanish par
Implications for treatment, defense against chemical weapons
A study led by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers the first molecular explanation of how the body metabolizes and detoxifies cocaine and heroin. “We show for the first time how humans initiate the breakdown and clearance of these dangerous narcotics,” said Dr. Matthew R. Redinbo, assistant professor in the department of chemistry, and in the School of Medicine’s department of biochemist
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