Life Sciences and Chemistry

One key to platelet integrin receptor found in transmembrane region

Integrin receptors allow cells to attach to other cells and to connective tissue which is necessary to form tissues, organs, or even people, for that matter. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have demonstrated that a key to activating αIIbβ3, the integrin that allows platelets to form blood clots, can be found in the part of the molecule embedded within a platelet’s outer

Results from Model-based functional genomics research provides new insight on the pathogenetic mechanism which causes diseases such as ALS

Ingenium Pharmaceuticals AG and a coalition of international research organizations announced today the publication in Science of research describing a fundamental discovery about the genetic and molecular basis for Motor Neuron Disease (MND), which includes Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The research explains a key pathogenetic mechanism of

In the fall of 1952, Stanley Miller, now a chemistry professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), began simulating primitive earthly conditions in an experiment that produced the basic building blocks of life. When he published the results in Science on May 15 the following year, he kick-started research on the origin of life and transformed modern thinking on a dormant area of science.

Jeffrey Bada, a professor of marine chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanogr

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the first mammalian gametes grown in vitro directly from embryonic stem cells. The work, in which mouse stem cells placed in Petri dishes — without any special growth or transcription factors — grew into oocytes and then into embryos, will be reported this week on the web site of the journal Science.

The results demonstrate that even outside the body embryonic stem cells remain totipotent, or capable of generating any of the body&

ONR-sponsored Bonnie Bassler looks at bacterial communication

She thinks they’re everywhere. What’s more, she thinks they talk to each other.
But don’t snicker…ONR-sponsored Bonnie Bassler won a MacArthur Foundation ’genius award’ last year for her research on how some of the most deadly microbes we know – cholera, plague, TB, just to mention a few – communicate surprisingly well.

In her Princeton Lab, Bassler (and the rest of the microbiology community) calls it ’quor

Two papers in the May 1 issue of Genes & Development reveal unexpectedly widespread genomic binding by the Myc protein – prompting scientists to consider that this highly studied human oncogene may still have a few secrets to reveal.

Independent research groups led by Drs. Robert Eisenman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center) and Bruno Amati (European Institute of Oncology) report on the first genome-wide analyses of in vivo Myc targets in the Drosophila and human genomes, respectively. As the my