Life Sciences and Chemistry

Scientists working with cells that may someday be used to replace diseased or damaged cells in the brain have taken neural stem cell technology a key step closer to the clinic.

Writing in the current online edition (June 2003) of the Journal of Neurochemistry, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center describe the first molecular profile for human fetal neural stem cell lines that have been coaxed to thrive in culture for more than a year.

The work is a

Cells show promise for cancer and transplant patients because of rapid growth in bone marrow

Scientists with University Health Network have discovered a new class of human stem cells that rapidly grow when implanted in the bone marrow of mice. The findings, available today in an advance on-line publication of the international scientific journal Nature Medicine, are a major advancement in human stem cell research with possible significant clinical implications for designing more effec

’Finished’ sequence reveals twice as many genes, cereal similarity

Behold a grain of rice. Inside are thousands of cells; within each cell are 12 chromosomes; and on rice’s smallest chromosome, No. 10, are about 3,500 genes and more than 22 million base pairs, the links in the chain of DNA.
So, what’s the big deal about rice’s smallest chromosome?

There are several, according to a report in the June 6 issue of the journal Science. Upon close exami

For decades, scientists have disagreed about the way the brain gathers memories, developing two apparently contradictory concepts. But newly published research by a team of scientists at Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN) indicates that both models of memory may be partially correct – and that resolving this conflict could lead to new approaches for the treatment of memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

The dispute has centered on how

Scientists announce in the current issue of the journal Nature their discovery that plants respond to environmental stresses with a sequence of molecular signals known in humans and other mammals as the “G-protein signaling pathway,” revealing that this signaling strategy has long been conserved throughout evolution. Because a large percentage of all the drugs approved for use in humans target the G-protein signaling pathway, the team’s findings could also be used in the search for plant compounds t

In plants, many proteins are degraded or activated within the vacuole, a large water and nutrient-filled vesicle found in plant cells that helps maintain the shape of plant cells and that stores food molecules. The manner by which this degradation or activation occurs, however, is uncertain.

In the June 10, 2003, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), however, scientists from UC Riverside identify a key protein, vacuolar processing enzyme or VPEg, in Arabidops