Colorectal Cancer : The Notch Gene Plays a Key Role in Intestinal Development, Promising Therapeutic Perspectives and new Insights into Carcinogenesis

Through a long-standing collaboration, Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas and his group in Boston and Daniel Louvard’s CNRS team at the Institut Curie have discovered that the Notch gene plays a key role in intestinal development. Notch maintains the balance between stem cells and differentiated cells in the intestinal epithelium, thereby pl

Nature is a seemingly endless storehouse of interesting – and potentially life-saving – biological molecules. But tracking down and harvesting those chemicals in their natural form can be time-consuming, expensive and unreliable.

Now Salk scientists have discovered a new way of bringing “bio-prospecting” out of the rainforest and into the lab. Their findings are published in the June 16th edition of the journal Nature.

Stéphane Richard, Joseph Noel and Tomohisa Kuzuyama i

Study underscores the importance of non-coding DNA in disease determination

Today a team of scientists provides convincing evidence that the deletion of a large non-coding DNA segment on human chromosome 17 is responsible for Van Buchem disease. This genetic mutation is one of only a few disease-associated mutations discovered to date that alters a long-range transcriptional regulatory element. The study appears online in the journal Genome Research.

“Our study addre

The most common form of lung cancer may begin in a group of newly isolated lung stem cells, according to researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Working in a mouse model, the researchers isolated a novel type of lung cell that can divide into fresh copies of itself and into the two more specialized kinds of cells deep in the lung. Their experiments show that at the earliest stage of tumor development, the stem cell appears to be the first lung cells that respond to

Biopolymers obtained by Russian researchers with the help of hydrogen bacteria, are compatible with tissues of the organism and are autodestractive after a while. That makes such biopolymers indispensable for medical articles.

Polymers of microbe origin, or biopolymers, have recently drawn increasing attention of a great variety of specialists. These polymers have two important advantages. Firstly, they get destroyed in the environment and thus solve the contamination problem.

Just as placebos have been shown to bring relief from pain, researchers have now found that they can affect emotion, alleviating the impact of unpleasant experiences. In an article in the June 16, 2005, issue of Neuron, researchers led by Predrag Petrovic of the Karolinska Institutet show that, in relieving anxiety, placebo treatment affects the same basic modulatory circuitry in the brain as it does for relieving pain.

In their experiments, the researchers tested the effect of pla

For and against: Aspirin for everyone over 50? BMJ Volume 330, pp 1440-3

Experts go head to head in this week’s BMJ over whether everyone over 50 should take a daily aspirin to reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes. Peter Elwood and colleagues at Cardiff University believe that the evidence now supports more widespread use of aspirin, and there needs to be a strategy to inform the public and enable older people to make their own decision.

As a general rul

Brown bears, squirrels, bats and frogs could hold the key to why western populations are facing an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, according to professor of medicine Peter Grant. If his theory is proven, it will “completely change the view of diabetes and its cause.”

By 2025, 300 million people worldwide will suffer from type 2 diabetes, up to 85 per cent of whom will die of related heart disease. The condition, associated with obesity, develops when the body’s fat cells secrete protei

A missing receptor molecule contributes to the growth of tumors in human ovaries. This surprisingly evident connection has now been proven by a team at the Medical University of Vienna, who published their data in the science journal Molecular Cancer Research. The team, who is supported by funding from the Austrian Science Fund FWF, also discovered the possible genetic reason why the receptor molecule, which is an important factor in regulating cell growth, is missing.

In healthy

Dutch researcher Joke van Vugt investigated extremely selfish chromosomes which ensure only male offspring in two species of parasitoid wasps. She discovered that the discriminating chromosomes in the two species are not genetically similar, even though they have exactly the same effect.

Parasitoid wasps are haplodiploid. This means that the male wasps develop from unfertilised eggs and only have one set of chromosomes, namely those of their mother. Female wasps develop from fertili

Brains are marvels of diversity: no two look the same — not even those of otherwise identical twins. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found one explanation for the puzzling variety in brain organization and function: mobile elements, pieces of DNA that can jump from one place in the genome to another, randomly changing the genetic information in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly dif

Turning on a single male-specific gene produces a female fruit fly that displays male courtship behaviors: chasing other females, tapping their abdomens and performing wing-beating love serenades. The results, published in the June 15 online edition of the journal Nature, show that a single gene can determine how females and males detect and respond differently to sexual cues.

’’In these experiments we see all the steps of the male courtship ritual you could physically expect a fe

A technique derived from industry could help stroke patients to move again.

Researchers at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and the School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences have begun working on a project to establish whether iterative learning control techniques can help a stroke patient to re-learn movement.

Dr Jane Burridge from the School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences who is leading the

Dutch researcher Michel Varkevisser has discovered that chronic sleep complaints are associated with a reduced performance. This conclusion contradicts earlier findings. The researcher postulates that under normal daily circumstances, the lower performance level was probably not visible because the sleep sufferers invest extra energy in carrying out a task.

Research psychologist Michel Varkevisser investigated how sleeping problems affected the performances of employees under both labor

Wet work and its health effects attracted much attention at the conference ’Occupational and Environmental Exposures of Skin to Chemicals – 2005’, which was held in Stockholm, Sweden 12-15 June 2005. The experts agreed that the harmful effects from wet work affecting large parts of the population have been neglected far too long and that action is needed.

Household cleaning, dish washing, food preparation, work in the heath care sector, hair dressing and metal work are impo

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine working with scientists at Elan Pharmaceuticals, have reported promising results in mice of a vaccine approach to treating Parkinson’s and similar diseases. These results appear in the June edition of the journal Neuron.

Eliezer Masliah, M.D., Professor of Neurosciences and Pathology at UCSD, and colleagues at UCSD and Elan Pharmaceuticals in San Francisco, vaccinated mice using a a combination of the prot