In the quest to repair damaged DNA – a process believed crucial in combating ailments ranging from cancer to aging – antioxidant has been the Holy Grail. But findings published this week in Nature suggest oxidation isn’t always the enemy.
Scientists at Michigan State University, along with colleagues in England, have uncloaked a mechanism that uses oxygen to repair DNA – until now an unlikely part of the restorative recipe. Their work is published in the Sept. 12 issue of the British sc
Cornell University entomologists have unlocked an evolutionary secret to how insects evolve into new species. The discovery has major implications for the control of insect populations through disruption of mating, suggesting that over time current eradication methods could become ineffective, similar to the way insects develop pesticide resistance.
The researchers, led by Wendell L. Roelofs, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Insect Biochemistry at Cornell, made the discovery while exami
DNA has an oscillating double-helix structure. This oscillating means that the DNA molecules conduct electricity much less well than was previously thought. Ultrafast cameras were one of the devices the researchers from Amsterdam used to demonstrate this.
It turns out the DNA does not have a rigid regular structure as stated in textbooks. In reality the double helix of DNA forms a very dynamic chaotic system. The rigid structure in textbooks should be regarded as the average position of many
Developing countries stand to profit most from advances in genome science, write Samuel Broder, Stephen Hoffman and Peter Hotez in this month’s issue of EMBO reports (EMBO reports September, 2002 pp 806–812). They claim that biotechnology coupled with genomics might emerge as the key technology in the 21st century for improving global health and probably even avoiding major political conflicts and wars.
The authors warn that we must no longer view the diseases of the developing world in
A Surrey scientist claims to have an answer to what is often considered to be the hardest problem in science (sometimes just known as the “Hard Problem”): why we are aware.
Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, has previously proposed that consciousness is generated by the brain’s electromagnetic field, the cemi field. The cemi field theory – that our thoughts are electric fields in the brain – has generated a lot of interest both in the UK and across
Answer revealed in glowing live cells
Using a new mouse model that literally glows with health- protecting molecules, researchers have rewritten part of the textbook tale about how the immune system knows when to fight germs.
Time-lapse video from a pair of Harvard Medical School labs shows how pieces of captured germs may work their way to the surface of live dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are immune cells that alert other immune cells about invading germs. Inside a dendri
Mechanism may provide insights into development and cancer
When cells divide in two, they must carefully manage the process by which their DNA is replicated and then apportioned to the daughter cells. In one critical step along the way, the replicated DNA strands – or sisters – are held together for a period by a temporary scaffold of bridging proteins. When the timing is right, the proteins unzip, allowing the DNA sisters to separate. Errors in this or other steps in cell division ca
Protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) belongs to a group of molecules that on the basis of earlier studies has been proposed to be a controlling factor for learning and memory. The ETH researchers produced genetically modified mice in which the activity of PP1 can be reduced at will. These animals were subjected to various learning and memory tests in one of which, the mice had to learn about various objects in a box. For this, they were trained on different schedules: without any interruption during learning
USDA Forest Service plant pathologists have discovered a new cause of damage to loblolly pine seedlings grown in the South – needle nematodes. In the July 2002 issue of Plant Disease, pathologists Stephen Fraedrich (SRS Insects and Diseases of Southern Forests unit in Athens, GA) and Michelle Cram (Forest Health Protection Program, Region 8) report on finding a previously undescribed species of nematode stunting the growth of pine seedlings in a Georgia nursery.
In 1998, a three-year study w
Some bottles of wine are worth thousands of dollars. But if oxygen has leaked past the cork, it could be thousand-dollar vinegar — and there’s no way to tell without opening the bottle. Now chemists at the University of California, Davis, can check an unopened bottle for spoilage using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the same technology used for medical MRI scans.
Natural bacteria in wine use oxygen from the air to turn alcohol into vinegar, or acetic acid. If a wine bottle is secur
Like tiny Russian dolls, the mealybugs that infest your houseplants carry bacteria inside their cells that are themselves infected with another type of bacteria. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, shows that instead of spreading from bug to bug, the second set of bacteria infected the first several times in the past and are now being passed along and evolving with them.
The knowledge could be useful for working out how the insect species are related to each o
Scientists have analyzed the complete genome sequence of an emerging human pathogen, Streptococcus agalactiae (also known as group B streptococcus or “strep B”), which is a leading cause of pneumonia and meningitis in newborns and the source of life-threatening illnesses in a growing number of adults with deficient immune systems.
The study, published this week in the on-line version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), not only determined the pathogen’s genet
Forget about duct tape. Just grab the ’gecko glue’
Geckos, nature’s supreme climbers, can race up a polished glass wall at a meter per second and support their entire body weight from a wall with only a single toe. But the gecko’s remarkable climbing ability has remained a mystery since Artistotle first observed it in fourth century B.C.
Now a team of biologists and engineers has cracked the molecular secrets of the gecko’s unsurpassed sticking power–opening the door for e
For nearly 200 years, scientists have known that the elements molybdenum and oxygen can form various large molecules, which usually impart a unique blue color to aqueous solutions. Only recently have scientists been able to isolate these molecules, but no one was able to explain their supramolecular structure in solution, until now. In a paper scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (available online August 20), Tianbo Liu, a physicist at the U.S. Depa
UCI researchers find that consumption of certain food types cause the constricting reptile to expend excessive energy in digestion
Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side,” is noted for morphing animal scientific attributes into human behavior in his comic strips. Consider the sketch of a family of pythons lying about after Thanksgiving dinner. The snakes that consumed a mouse, some chicken and glucose are ready to go out and play football shortly after dining. But the pythons that indu
A comprehensive examination of how the unique head and snout affects maneuverability and the role of its electrosensory function for seeking food along the ocean floor
Why the peculiar head shape of the hammerhead shark developed as it did has been the subject of much speculation. The dorso-ventrally compressed and laterally expanded pre-branchial head is an unmistakable diagnostic feature of the sphyrnid sharks. This unique head shape has been termed the cephalofoil in recognition of
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