Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who are taking levodopa therapy – the most widely-used agent to treat the illness – may experience the effects of their medication “wearing off” sooner than their health care providers realize. New data presented Oct. 19 at the Parkinson’s Study Group meeting in San Francisco concluded that a specifically-designed patient questionnaire identified symptoms related to “wearing off” more frequently than a clinical assessment by a movement disorder specialist.

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that an experimental vaccine to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), a highly lethal disease, elicits a strong neutralizing antibody response in laboratory animals – a response that is key to preventing the virus from causing infection.

In addition, the antibodies, produced in nonhuman primates that received the vaccine, protected hamsters from disease even when administered 5 days after exposure.

These findings provide proof

Walruses are ’right-flippered’, according to research published this week in BMC Ecology. The first study of walrus feeding behaviour in the wild showed that the animals preferentially use their right flipper to remove sediment from buried food. This is the first time that any aquatic animal has been shown to prefer using one flipper to the other when foraging. Direct observations of the underwater behaviour of free-living marine mammals are rare, especially if the animals are dang

Scientists here have found that a protein in the retrovirus known as human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) can cause immune cells to divide and proliferate, helping the virus spread through the body.

The protein, known as p12, was formerly thought to be unimportant during infection, causing scientists to regard it as a nonessential “accessory gene.”

This new study, however, shows that the protein forces infected cells to produce interleukin 2 (IL-2), a substance that stimu

Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered that the eye’s vision-producing rods and cones cannot tell the difference between their respective light-detecting molecules. The findings appeared in a recent issue of Nature.

At the heart of the researchers’ side-by-side comparison is the quest to solve a fundamental mystery of vision: how rods and cones have such different sensitivities to light despite using very similar processes to detect it.

Rods function in near darkness,

By using a laser microscope to spy on individual nerve cells in living mice, researchers have discovered that neurons’ wiring remain largely stable, providing a solid scaffold to accommodate the challenges in their environment. Specifically, the scientists found that the neuronal branches called “dendrites” remain largely unchanged in the highly active olfactory processing region of the mouse brain. Such evidence suggest that dendrites in the adult brain form a stable background even in the face

Cell membranes — the sacs encompassing the body’s living matter — can assume a variety of shapes as they morph to engulf materials, expel others and assemble themselves into tissues.

In the past it was possible for theoreticians only to analyze the thermodynamic forces behind membrane shape-shifting. But now a team of biophysicists from Cornell University, the National Institutes of Health and the W.M. Keck Foundation has been able to watch the sacs, or vesicles, reshaping themselves

A research team led by scientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered the location in mice where hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) reside, often called the HSCs’ microenvironment or “niche.” The team also identified mechanisms involved in controlling the size of the niche and the number of adult HSCs the body produces. This research has solved the puzzle of the hematopoietic stem cell niche first articulated more than 25 years ago and has defined its essential features in

NIH-funded researchers have identified a gene that appears to be a crucial signal for the beginning of puberty in human beings as well as in mice. Without a functioning copy of the gene, both humans and mice appear to be unable to enter puberty normally. The newly identified gene, known as GPR54, also appears necessary for normal reproductive functioning in human beings.

The study, funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), appears in the October

Scientists at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a gene that controls the amazing ability of adult stem cells to self-renew, or make new copies of themselves, throughout life.

In a series of extensive cell culture and animal studies, U-M scientists discovered that a gene called Bmi-1 was required for self-renewal in two types of adult stem cells – neural stem cells from the central nervous system and neural crest stem cells from the peripheral nervous sys

For more than a century, biologists have been working to assign plants, animals and microbes their respective places on the tree of life. More recently, by comparing DNA sequences from a few genes per species, scientists have been trying to construct a grand tree of life that accurately portrays the course of life on Earth, and shows how all organisms are related, one to another.

However, despite the detailed insights provided by individual genes, that approach has proved cumbersome in its

The signal, called Hedgehog, tells cells when and where to grow during embryonic development and is turned on in primitive cells,

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University have identified an agent that could lead to the early detection of many cancers.

The Case research team discovered that the human body increases production of the protein clusterin as a signal of cell distress and provides a reliable gauge of the general health of a cell. The findings were reported in a recent issue of the scientific journal Cancer Biology and Therapy.

“Understanding the processes that create this protein after

’Transcriptional Mutagenesis’ may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and aging

Two types of DNA damage that frequently befall most cells on an everyday basis can lead to the creation of damaged proteins that may contribute to neurodegeneration, aging and cancer, according to research by scientists at Emory University School of Medicine, published in the October 23 issue of the journal Molecular Cell.

The investigators used e. coli cells as a model sy

Molecular partners jagged and notch are key; a new role for the osteoblast

Just as oak barrels don’t simply hold fine wine but also play a vital role in its aging and development, scientists have discovered that bones nurture and control blood development in the bone marrow within to a profound extent.

In some sense the finding by scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital may not seem startling –

Poor bone quality in rats suggests new therapies to improve human treatment

In limited attempts with individual patients, varying surgeons have found mixed success in a method of growing new human jawbones after radiation therapy to treat head and neck cancer. While some patients have seemed to respond well to the technique, called distraction osteogenesis, others have not.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System are looking at how and why distraction osteoge