Cherie Booth QC today opened a world-leading facility at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory which is designed to understand how genes make proteins. The £3 million facility will use powerful X-rays from Daresbury Laboratory’s Synchrotron Radiation Source and advanced automation techniques to solve complex protein structures. This will underpin advances in research and healthcare.

The facility, a new beamline on Daresbury Laboratory’s Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS), is a collaboration between

Defect in neuroligin gene disrupts firing of neurons and may result in autism

The causes of autism have long remained a mystery, but new research from Columbia University Medical Center has identified, for the first time, how a cellular defect may be involved in the often crippling neurological disorder.

The research, which is published in today’s issue of Science, examines how a defect in neuroligin genes may contribute to autism. Neuroligins are components of sy

Adaptive valuation of social images by Rhesus Macaques

In a finding that deepens our understanding of animal social cognition, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have demonstrated for the first time that monkeys, like humans, value information according to its social content. People readily pay to see powerful or sexually attractive individuals, and, according to this new study, monkeys will also “pay” to view these kinds of images.

Both economics and evolution

UCR Biologist Mark Springer, Part of Research Team Publishing in Journal Science

One in five mammals living on Earth is a bat, yet their evolutionary history is largely unknown because of a limited fossil record and conflicting or incomplete theories about their origins and divergence. Now, a research team including University of California, Riverside Biology Professor Mark Springer, has published a paper in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science that uses molecular biology and

In the most detailed large-scale study to date of the proteins that package DNA, researchers have mapped a family of switches that turn genes on and off. Their findings may help scientists understand regulatory mechanisms underlying cancer and human development.

The research team includes first author Bradley Bernstein, recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) physician postdoctoral fellowship who works in the Harvard University laboratory of HHMI investigator Stua

As the human genome sequence neared completion several years ago, geneticists eagerly began discussing which other organisms to sequence — partly to see which DNA regions are similar across species and therefore likely to serve critical functions. But these discussions raised an important, and potentially expensive, question: How many species need to be sequenced to know whether evolution has conserved a given stretch of DNA?

In an article published in the January 2005 issue of PL

A team at the University of Sheffield has received a share of $3.6m from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to research potential causes and treatments for Parkinson’s Disease.

Dr. Oliver Bandmann, of the University’s Department of Academic Neurology, and Professor Philip Ingham FRS, of the Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics at the University of Sheffield, are the only team in England to receive an awarded from the Foundation. They have been given £105,000 to investigat

Study of a Completely New Way of Trying to Treat Cancer in the Future by the Use of Vaccination Injections

The first U.S. kidney cancer vaccine trial is now underway at Columbia University Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia. While the potential for vaccines to treat solid tumors has been recognized for more than a decade, this trial is pioneering the use of tumor immunotherapy – boosting the body’s natural immune system – as a way to fight cancer.

Contrary to the results of a recent U.S. study, investigators in Japan found no association between a herpesvirus infection and a potentially life-threatening form of high blood pressure, as reported in the March 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

The researchers reported that they were not able to detect human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8), also known as the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus, in the lungs of 22 patients with primary or other forms of pulmonary hy

Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists, in collaboration with colleagues from British and Italian universities, have unveiled a mechanism that causes the death of brain cells (neurons) in stroke. The discovery may help explain why some therapy approaches for stroke have been unsuccessful and identifies potential research avenues for the development of new treatments for stroke and other degenerative brain diseases.

Stroke is a consequence of an abrupt interruption of blood f

The first evidence that a group of proteins called phosphatases play a key role in the development of the nervous system, has been shown in fruit flies and mice by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, in collaboration with scientists at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California. The phosphatases are required for maintenance of neural stem cells and for silencing expression of neuronal genes in non-nervous system tissues.

Published in

As any dedicated video game player knows, the first requirement for using a weapon or tool is finding it. And it is no different for cell biologists and clinicians who want to take control of gene expression in cells to create therapies to treat disease. While cells have a variety of ways to control gene expression, the trick for players in this game is to recognize them amidst the incredibly complex background of cellular machinery.

Now, in a paper in the January 28th issue of C

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers have identified a molecular mechanism in the liver that explains, for the first time, how consuming foods rich in saturated fats and trans-fatty acids causes elevated blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides and increases one’s risk of heart disease and certain cancers.

In the Jan. 28 issue of Cell, scientists led by Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, report that the harmful effects of saturated and trans fats are set in motion by a biochemica

Stanford, California. Both plant and animal growth is controlled by steroid hormones–signaling molecules that tell specific genes in cells to begin the physiological process of increasing cell size. Although these molecular managers operate similarly in plants and animals, the chain of events in regulating cellular functions appears to be very different in the two kingdoms. In animals, hormone reception begins in the nucleus of the cell. In plants, a steroid hormone family called brassinosteroids

New imaging tool may change the way cancer is diagnosed and treated

The evolution over the last two decades of the nanocrystals known as quantum dots has seen the growth of this revolutionary new tool from electronic materials science to far-reaching biological applications that will allow researchers to study cell processes at the level of a single molecule and may result in new and better ways to diagnose and treat cancers.

Fluorescent semiconductor quantum dots, or qdo

A toxic chemical painted on the bottom of large vessels to protect against barnacles may cause hearing difficulties in whales and other mammals, according to a study by Yale researchers published in the Biophysical Journal.

The chemical tributyltin oxide (TBT) affects the mechanical activity of the outer hair cells, which modulate and boost incoming sound energy to the inner hair cells, according to senior author Joseph Santos-Sacchi, professor of surgery and neurobiology at Yale