By tracing the 30-million year history of variation in a gene found in plants such as tomatoes and tobacco, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have found new evidence to support an old idea — that some evolutionary changes are irreversible.

Their study, published this week in an early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers new support for the idea that the loss of complex traits, like eyes, wings or in this cas

A group of Northwestern University researchers is developing a novel gene therapy aimed at selectively turning off one of the genes involved in the development of Parkinson’s disease.

The gene therapy, described in the January online issue of the journal Experimental Neurology, was designed by Martha Bohn and her laboratory group at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Bohn is Medical Research Council Professor and director of the neurobiology progra

Investigating the harmful health effects of excess fat, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a protein that triggers death in mammalian cells overloaded with saturated fat.

When the researchers halted production of this protein, called EF1A-1, the cells were able to thrive in ordinarily damaging amounts of the saturated fat palmitate, a fat abundant in Western diets. At the same concentration of palmitate, normal cells still produc

Scientists at the UK’s leading plant science centre have uncovered a gene that could help to develop new varieties of crop that will be able to cope with the changing world climate. Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have identified the gene in barley that controls how the plant responds to seasonal changes in the length of the day. This is key to understanding how plants have adapted their flowering

Training your mind might be just as effective as working your muscles to treat chronic lower back pain. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders shows that therapy that helps chronic back pain sufferers overcome the psychological challenges associated with the pain is as effective as treatment that aims to restore back muscle strength and physical ability. Surprisingly, combining both psychological and physical treatments is not more effective than using th

Uppsala University scientists have developed a new method for measuring the concentration of the messenger substance for cells, cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), in individual living cells. Thanks to this method, the researchers have been able to see how the same messenger molecule can regulate disparate cell functions. The findings will probably be of great value in the development of new drugs for diabetes, among other diseases. The study is being published in the scientific journal Natur

A fossil fish skull from Latvia that researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden, describe in this weeks issue of Nature shows that the earliest land animals probably breathed through their ears.

“It looks as if the first step in the evolution of the middle ear had nothing to do with hearing. Our forebears developed ears in order to breathe through them,” says Professor Per Ahlberg.

The human sense of hearing is based on the interaction of two different organs: the inne

Researchers have found stronger evidence for a link between a parasite in cat faeces and undercooked meat and an increased risk of schizophrenia.

Research published today in Procedings of the Royal Society B, shows how the invasion or replication of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in rats may be inhibited by using anti-psychotic or mood stabilising drugs.

The researchers tested anti-psychotic and mood stabilising medications used for the treatment of schizophrenia on rats in

Hot competition for sex threatens biodiversity in world’s richest regions

In biodiversity hot spots like tropical rainforests, a dearth of pollinators could be putting many species at risk of extinction, according to a new study that includes three University of Pittsburgh researchers. The finding is raising concerns that more may need to be done to protect the Earth’s most biologically rich areas.

The study, titled “Pollination Decays in Biodiversity Hotspots,” appe

Researchers have labored for decades to understand blindness-inducing neurodegenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

It has been a painstaking scientific journey as AMD and RP each belong to a complex family of disorders, in which every disorder has many forms and each form is encoded with a distinct genetic recipe. Even AMD, a major cause of vision loss in people over 60, is actually a collection of more than 50 diseases

A new mechanism for regulating brain function

Non-coding regions of the genome – those that don’t code for proteins – are now known to include important elements that regulate gene activity. Among those elements are microRNAs, tiny, recently discovered RNA molecules that suppress gene expression.

Increasing evidence indicates a role for microRNAs in the developing nervous system, and researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston now demonstrate that one microRNA

Researchers have identified a new and unusual tumor suppressor gene that may be important in cancers of the lung and head and neck. The study shows that restoring the inactivated gene can slow the growth of tumor cells.

The gene, known as TCF21, is silenced in tumor cells through a chemical change known as DNA methylation, a process that is potentially reversible.

The findings might therefore lead to new strategies for the treatment and early detection of lung cancer,

Scientists believe that despite the current concerns around anti-inflammatory drugs like Vioxx, they may still be the best option for treating some forms of arthritis.

In a Nature Reviews of Drug Discovery article this month the researchers from Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London examine the use of selective inhibitors of cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2).

They argue that although this class of drugs, which includes Vioxx, has been associated with an i

Compounds in blackcurrants could prevent Alzheimer’s disease and the characteristics of British berries suggest they do it best, writes Jennifer Rohn in Chemistry & Industry magazine.

New research led by Dilip Ghosh of the Horticulture and Food Research Institute in New Zealand, shows that compounds in blackcurrants have a potent protective effect in cultured neuronal cells against the types of stress caused by dopamine and amyloid-ß, a peptide associated with Alzheimer’s di

Everyone knows what happens to water when it boils—everyone, that is, except computers. Modeling the transformation process of matter moving from one phase to another, such as from liquid to gas, has been all but impossible near the critical point. This is due to the increasingly complex way molecules behave as they approach the change from one phase to another. Researchers at the University of Rochester, however, have now created a mathematical model that will allow scientists to simulate and

Mediating molecule provides new research target for diabetes, obesity

Constant darkness throws a molecular switch in mammals that shifts the body’s fuel consumption from glucose to fat and induces a state of torpor in mice, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston reports in the Jan. 19 edition of Nature.

While their findings could provide new insight into mammalian hibernation, researchers note that the pivotal metabolic