Researchers from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam have demonstrated that a gene helps in the neat repair of DNA. Without this gene the body would repair damaged DNA in a careless manner more often. This causes new damage, which can lead to cancer.
The careless repair of damaged DNA can cause mutations and can result in cancer. Cell biologists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam studied the repair of double strand breaks. Such breaks can for example arise following radiotherapy.
T
Life on the moons of Jupiter, and a source of healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids and low temperature enzymes that could even make washing powders work at low temperatures: The microbes that live in Antarctic sea ice may hold the answers to a host of everyday applications as well as revealing how life forms might be able to exist on frozen planets. One of those interested in sea ice and the life forms it supports is Dr David Thomas of the University`s School of Ocean Sciences. He is presently the on
Combining two separate observations of cells in brain tumours could enable doctors to improve the success rate of radiotherapy. Speaking today (23 January) at the Institute of Physics Simulation and Modelling Applied to Medicine conference in London, chemical engineer Dr Norman Kirkby from the University of Surrey will explain how using the correct time intervals between a sequence of low dose radiotherapy sessions could increase the chance of curing brain cancers that tend to resist treatment.
Genes mean ladies like friends and partners that smell like their father.
Bachelors – ditch the Old Spice and don your prospective father-in-law’s clothes. Women prefer the scent of their dad, a study shows, and may choose their friends and partners accordingly.
Nervous new boyfriends can live or die by the nod of a date’s daunting dad. But Carole Ober and her team at the University of Chicago in Illinois have found a more fundamental fatherly influence: women prefe
Chimpanzee waste could shed light on the origins and spread of HIV.
Delving into droppings has given AIDS researchers a surprise. Far fewer chimpanzees than they had suspected have SIVcpz, the animal virus most like HIV.
The technique could shed much-needed light on the origins and evolution of the viruses that cause AIDS. “It’s a non-invasive means to study the wild relative of HIV in its natural environment,” says Beatrice Hahn, of the University of Alabama in Birmingham,
A new type of Earth ecosystem could be found on other planets.
Scientists have found a community of microbes unlike anything else on Earth. Conditions in this ecosystem could mimic those on Earth when life began, and might exist elsewhere in today’s Solar System.
Home to the microbes is a hot spring 200 metres beneath the US state of Idaho. Their lives owe nothing to the Sun. They generate energy by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide, releasing methane as a by
A new theory on the evolution of ancient microbes is set to challenge widespread scientific views of early life on earth and could overturn previous interpretations of the huge bank of molecular taxonomic data that has been built up in recent years, according to research published today in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.
“I`ve reinterpreted fossil records to show that eukaryotes, which includes plants, animals and fungi, are only half as old as previous
Most mothers-to-be must simply hope for healthy offspring. But female house finches tip the odds in their babies’ favor by pre-determining their gender, a new study suggests. According to a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, enterprising mother house finches adjust the sex and growth of their offspring to account for the order in which the eggs are laid, thereby reducing the mortality of their sons and daughters by 10 to 20 percent.
Alexander Badyaev of the Univer
Scientists are calling it “biology of the next generation,” and a major step towards transforming information from genome projects into applications such as the discovery of new drugs. Today researchers from Heidelberg have announced the completion of a large-scale study of the “molecular machines” formed by nearly two thousand proteins in a living cell.
In a paper published in the current edition of Nature, a team of scientists from the biotechnology start-up company CellZome and the Europe
BSE in sheep: first estimates of human death toll
The first attempt to estimate the human health risk from possible BSE infection of the British sheep flock is published today by researchers from Imperial College, London.
They show that while the present risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from eating sheep could be greater than that from cattle, the overall historical risk from sheep is much less than that from cattle.
The research, which is reported in the jo
A virus that causes a fatal brain disease in horses and sheep may be linked to certain mental disorders in man, medical experts heard today (Wednesday 09 January 2002) during a joint meeting of the European Societies of Clinical and Veterinary Virology and the Society for General Microbiology at the Royal College of Physicians, London.
“Recent investigations have again stimulated highly controversial discussions as to whether Borna disease virus can infect humans and lead to psychiatric diso
The discovery of small spikes lining the mouths of primitive fossil fish reveal surprising new details about how early animals fed. New research published today in a Royal Society paper sheds light on how teeth evolved.
Primitive fish did not have jaws or fins but were covered in rigid bony scales and resembled small armour-plated submarines. Dr Mark Purnell, a palaeontologist at the University of Leicester, has discovered that heterostracans, one of the most important groups of these early
The discovery by French scientists that cotton plants produce a kind of ‘plant aspirin’ in response to bacterial infection could lead to new ways of fighting crop diseases.
Researchers led by the French Institute of Research for Development (IRD) found that salicylic acid — which has a chemical structure very similar to that of aspirin — and jasmonate acid are both released by cotton plants in response to infection by the bacterium Xanthomonas .
The two plant hormones play
Meteorites could have sweetened the earliest life.
Sugar from space may have nourished the first life on Earth. Two meteorites contain a range of polyols, organic substances closely related to sugars such as glucose 1 .
George Cooper of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and co-workers have found these compounds in the Murchison meteorite, which fell over the Australian town Murchison in 1969, and in the Murray meteorite, that fell to Kentucky in 1950.
The structure of one of the basic members of the cell-membrane water-channel family, a protein called aquaporin 1 (AQP1), has been determined to a resolution of 2.2 angstroms (22 billionths of a meter).
The structure reveals the elegantly simple means by which AQP1 can transport water through the cell membrane at a high rate while effectively blocking everything else, even individual protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms.
Biophysicist Bing Jap led a team from Lawrence Berkeley Nat
Enzymatic films for bioactive surfaces
We encounter them every day in laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, or shower gel: surfactants – surface-active substances. Surfactants belong to a category of molecules called amphiphiles, molecular hermaphrodites consisting of a water-loving (hydrophilic) “head” and a water-hating (hydrophobic) “tail”. Most surfacants are small amphiphilic molecules. However, an international research team working with Roeland J. M. Nolte, University of Nijme
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