Female mice that are abnormally small due to gene “knockout” technology are also bad mothers whose poor parenting skills cause their young to die within a day or two of birth, scientists report this week in the on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since Chawnshang Chang, Ph.D., cloned the gene for testicular orphan receptor 4 (TR4) 10 years ago, he and other scientists have tried to learn its function – scientists call it an “orphan” recept

Morphogens are molecules that play a role in the development of organs

Scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center believe they have answered some critical questions that address how signaling molecules, called morphogens, work. Morphogens are secreting signaling molecules that play a key role in the formation of the shape and size of organs. For example, these molecules play a role in determining the bean-like shape of human kidneys. But when these molecules mal

Supposed psychic powers that enable people to see auras around others may simply be a quirk of the brain, according to a University College London (UCL) study of a rare form of synaesthesia where some people see colourful ‘auras’ around their loved ones.

The case study, reported in the October issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology, shows how some people can experience colours in response to people they know or words that evoke emotions – a condition known as emotion-colour synaesthe

Navarre researcher, Jaione Valle Turrillas, has identified two genes that could help as targets for pharmaceutical drugs that fight the Staphylococcus aureus “one of the bacteria which causes most infections in medical implants”. The results of her research have been published in her PhD thesis, “The role of the global regulators SarA and õB in Staphylococcus aureus biofilm formation”, defended at the Public University of Navarre.

Bacterias a thousand time more resistant

The Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and Ghent University have started up a new biopharmaceutical company named Peakadilly nv. Peakadilly will develop and market a new generation of molecular diagnostics − so-called protein bio-markers − using innovative proteomics technology developed by the research group under the direction of Joël Vandekerckhove. The markers can be used in the development of medicines, making the process much more efficient, effective a

Breast cancer is the most frequent form of cancer in women around the world. The fact that this cancer is more frequent in the developed world suggests that life style and environmental factors may be involved. Nutritional factors are particularly important, given people’s continual exposure through dietary habits. Among them, dietary fats are the main element involved in breast cancer. Fats do not cause cancer, however some of them, such as animal fats or certain vegetable fats, accelerate th

Patients infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) are six times as likely to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) than individuals that are virus free, according to research presented today at the Third Annual Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting. HCV infected patients have a seventeen fold higher risk for developing diffuse large B-Cell lymphoma, researchers from British Columbia documented. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is the most common variety of NHL, comprising approximate

A drug that reduces symptoms of systemic lupus in mice may turn out to be effective against hardening of the arteries and thus prevent heart attacks, according to two poster presentations today at the American College of Rheumatology meeting in San Antonio.

Nilamadhab Mishra, M.D., of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the drug, called Trichostatin A or TSA, “may have a therapeutic benefit in atherosclerosis,” which causes coronary artery disease by blocking ke

Building on their earlier work, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that an apparently nontoxic cellular “energy blocker” can eradicate large liver tumors grown in rats. Six months to more than a year after treatment was stopped, the rats are still cancer free.

While the results are dramatic, clinical trials with the chemical, 3-bromopyruvate, are likely some years away, says the study’s leader, Young Ko, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology and biological chemistry.

The evolution of resistance to currently prescribed HIV-1 protease inhibitors is devastating to patients and is surprising given the way these drugs work. Protease inhibitors are all small-molecule, competitive, active-site inhibitors–low molecular weight compounds that fit squarely in the center of the active site of HIV-1 protease and prevent protein processing that is essential to the replication of the virus. It would seem as though mutations occurring in the protease that prevent drug bindin

The malaria vaccine reported today to reduce life-threatening cases of the parasitic disease among children in Mozambique is based on the pioneering research of Drs. Ruth and Victor Nussenzweig and their colleagues at NYU School of Medicine.

Ruth Nussenzweig, Doc en Med, Ph.D., the C.V. Starr Professor of Medical and Molecular Parasitology, and her husband, Victor Nussenzweig, M.D., Ph.D., the Hermann M. Biggs Professor of Preventive Medicine, have devoted decades of research

Waiting 30 seconds to two minutes after birth to cut the umbilical cord of a premature baby appears to lessen chances of bleeding in the newborn’s brain and reduce the need for transfusions, according to a new review of research.

Standard practice for preterm babies is to cut the cord as soon as possible, often within 10 to 15 seconds. A systematic review finds that delaying the clamping rather than doing it immediately also reduces anemia and increases blood pressure and blood v

The active, younger population of Liverpool, who suffer from arthritis or chronic injury can now benefit from knee replacement surgery much earlier in life due to the latest implant technology, called Oxinium™, which has recently been made available to everyone in the UK after 11 years of tests.

Mrs Linda Wood, a 49 year-old voluntary playgroup leader from Liverpool, received one of the first Oxinium knee implants in the UK, after suffering with increasing chronic pain in her left

People with diabetes mellitus have three to four times the risk of developing liver cancer, and more than twice the risk of developing pancreatic cancer than non-diabetic individuals, according to research presented today at the Third Annual Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Meeting in Seattle.

Marie-Claude Rousseau, lead author on the study, compared 3,288 men diagnosed with 12 different cancer types to 509 healthy individuals, in order to determine whether those reporting

Mice with kids’ muscle tumors raise hope for new treatments

In a pair of new studies, University of Utah scientists took early but significant steps to fight a particularly deadly childhood muscle cancer by identifying some of the genetic events that cause the disease and then engineering mice that develop the tumors. The genetic events might be targets for new drugs that could be tested on the mice.

The disease, named alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, “is a very mean childh

From language to literature, from music to mathematics, a single protein appears central to the formation of the long-term memories needed to learn these and all other disciplines, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health. Their findings appear in the October 15 issue of Science.

The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor.