Life Sciences and Chemistry
Articles and reports from the Life Sciences and chemistry area deal with applied and basic research into modern biology, chemistry and human medicine.
Valuable information can be found on a range of life sciences fields including bacteriology, biochemistry, bionics, bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, genetics, geobotany, human biology, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, zoology, bioinorganic chemistry, microchemistry and environmental chemistry.
UT Southwestern researchers find protein that both instigates, inhibits heart growth in mice
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered a protein that regulates growth and development of the heart from its fetal stage to adulthood.
Findings published in today’s edition of Cell report that the protein, named Homeodomain-Only Protein (HOP) by the researchers, is active in controlling heart growth at various stages of development in mice. Dr. Eric Olson, chairman of molecular biology at UT Southwestern and the study’s principal investigator, said the team
Gene that regulates development of heart cells identified, described by Penn researchers
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have identified and described a small gene that regulates the delicate balance involved in the healthy growth and replication of heart muscle cells.
“This finding is likely to be important for our understanding of the causes of congenital heart disease. It is also relevant to our attempts to regrow damaged heart muscle,” said the corresponding author of the study, Jonathan A. Epstein, MD, of Penn’s Departments of Medicine a
Eavesdropping occurs among animals, finds evolutionary biologist
Eavesdropping among animals influences their behavior, Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, has found.
Dugatkin and a colleague, Ryan Earley of Georgia State University, studied eavesdropping among male swordtail fish they placed in an experimental tank. They put two fish on one side of a partition and a lone observer male on the other. In some cases, the partitions were clear and in others, opaque.
The fish that could observe their potential adve
Living in a glass house: Ocean organism’s novel dwelling helps Earth’s atmosphere
Why live in a glass house? For diatoms — tiny ocean-dwelling organisms that live in exquisitely ornate glass cases — the benefit turns out to be enormous.
In a paper published in the Sept. 13 issue of Science, Princeton scientists show that diatoms probably depend on glass to survive because the material facilitates photosynthesis. However, their study suggests that this domestic arrangement has a much bigger beneficiary: the entire planet, which owes its present-day, oxygen-rich and carbo
Structure reveals details of cell’s cargo-carriers
Using x-ray crystallography, researchers have produced the first images of a large molecular complex that helps shape and load the small, bubble-like vesicles that transport newly formed proteins in the cell. Understanding vesicle “budding” is one of the prerequisites for learning how proteins and other molecules are routed to their correct destinations in the cell.
In an article published in the September 19, 2002, issue of the journal Nature, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investi
Researchers identify enzyme that turns on RNA
Knowing an organism’s genome is good, but knowing what turns on its genes is even better.
Scientists have long searched for triggers that activate ribonucleic acid (RNA), a key component in gene expression. Now, in the Thursday, Sept. 19 issue of the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that they have found an enzyme that activates RNA, which could lead to new ways of regulating genetic information.
“One of the big questions in molecular