General

Some bacterial pathogens cause damage in the genomes of their infected cells which could lead to the initiation of cancer. While it is difficult to link an infection with an onset of cancer that arises many years later in life, researchers have been looking for definitive proof that such links […]

Plant biologists have long sought a deeper understanding of foundational processes involving kinases, enzymes that catalyze key biological activities in proteins. Analyzing the processes underlying kinases in plants takes on greater urgency in today’s environment increasingly altered by climate warming. Certain “SnRK2” kinases (sucrose-non-fermenting-1-related protein kinase-2s) are essential since they […]

For more than 40 years, scientists and commercial companies have been recreating human skin in laboratories around the world. Yet all of these products lack important aspects of normal skin–hair, nerves, and fat. In new research, cultured human skin cells embedded with fat and nerves and capable of growing hair […]

With few exceptions, the worldwide community of clinics offering first generation stem cell therapies is not usually a source of reliable data. They don't tend to conduct trials or even much report on the results of their work. Further, the stem cell therapies used can vary enormously in effectiveness. Cells are fickle […]

One of the many interesting approaches to targeting cancer cells for destruction is the use of viruses that are largely innocuous to humans, but replicate preferentially in cells exhibiting the characteristics of cancer, such as continual cellular replication. Researchers here demonstrate a way to engineer a virus to require the biochemistry of […]

Today I'll point out an example of drug reuse and autophagy upregulation. The processes of autophagy are responsible for recycling molecular waste and broken cellular structures. Autophagy is upregulated in response to stress placed upon cells, whether by heat, cold, lack of nutrients, a toxic local environment, and so forth. This is […]

Some people get better from COVID-19 quicker than others. This is because of several factors, one of which is the condition of the immune system. People with rheumatic diseases such as arthritis take immunosuppressant medications. Are they at a bigger COVID-19 risk? Scientists from UCL decided to look into it. […]

Researchers from Alberta, California and Colorado Combine 3D Imaging and Machine Learning to Create Prototype Diagnostic Tool. Most children with rare genetic diseases spend years undergoing medical tests and waiting for a diagnosis – a long, exhausting process that takes its toll on children and their families. Almost half of […]

It’s summer and you might want to enjoy the sun a little bit more. However, sun’s UV rays may make you brown, but they may also give you cancer. Scientists from the University of Queensland conducted a research and found that targeting large clones of skin cells caused by ultraviolet […]

Cancer cells can turn on error-prone DNA copy pathways to adapt to cancer treatment, a breakthrough study published in the journal Science has revealed. Bacteria use the same process, termed stress-induced mutagenesis, to develop antibiotic resistance. The cells of the human body are constantly dividing, and each time we need to copy […]

The first signs of insufficient sleep are universally familiar. There are tiredness and fatigue, difficulty concentrating, perhaps irritability, or even tired giggles. Far fewer people have experienced the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, including disorientation, paranoia, and hallucinations. Total, prolonged sleep deprivation, however, can be fatal. While it has been […]

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are often accompanied by amyloid proteins in the brain that have become clumped or misfolded. At Washington University in St. Louis, a newly developed technique that measures the orientation of single molecules is enabling, for the first time, optical microscopy to reveal nanoscale […]

Disrupted nightly sleep and clogged arteries tend to sneak up on us as we age. And while both disorders may seem unrelated, a new UC Berkeley study helps explain why they are, in fact, pathologically intertwined. UC Berkeley sleep scientists have begun to reveal what it is about fragmented nightly […]

A protein-coding gene associated with autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, collectively referred to as inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, will be the focus of new research in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside. The work is made possible by a National Institutes of […]

Systems biologist Paola Picotti receives this year’s Rössler Prize for her groundbreaking work in the field of proteomics. She has developed a method of measuring structural changes in thousands of proteins at the same time, paving the way for personalised therapy. The announcement in March 2003 that a human genome […]

New studies show how DNA crossovers can drive healthy, abnormal sperm, egg cell division. In the famous words of movie character Forrest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.” The same principle applies to human genetics. When the body forms sperm or […]

NIH funded study supports link between high levels of gram-negative bacteria and a stroke- seizure- and headache-inducing vascular malformation. In a nationwide study, NIH funded researchers found that the presence of abnormal bundles of brittle blood vessels in the brain or spinal cord, called cavernous angiomas (CA), are linked to […]

Checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy, that target myeloid immune cells and slow tumor growth were discovered by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions. Reporting in Nature Cancer, the researchers showed for the first time in human cells and a mouse model that inhibiting the […]

Canadian scientists have achieved a first in the study of telomerase, an essential enzyme implicated in aging and cancer. In today’s edition of the prestigious journal Molecular Cell, scientists from Université de Montréal used advanced microscopy techniques to see single molecules of telomerase in living cells. A flaw in the replication […]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have discovered a better way to separate actinium-227, a rare isotope essential for an FDA-approved cancer treatment. To produce Ac-227, researchers recover radium-226 from obsolete medical devices and fabricate it into targets that are irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor. Ac-227 is then separated from […]

A team of scientists from Japan recently achieved more efficient degradation of the human serum albumin protein―an important protein in the blood―via high-intensity infrared irradiation, by attaching a zinc metal complex to the protein. Their findings indicate the potential for future application of certain metal complexes to therapeutic interventions for […]

What we eat can affect the outcome of chemotherapy – and likely many other medical treatments – because of ripple effects that begin in our gut, new research from the University of Virginia suggests. Scientists found that diet can cause microbes in the gut to trigger changes in the host’s […]

A new study from the University of Georgia has shown that exposure to a now-banned flame retardant can alter the genetic code in sperm, leading to major health defects in children of exposed parents. Published recently in Scientific Reports, the study is the first to investigate how polybrominated biphenyl-153 (PBB153), the […]

Octopuses, squids and other sea creatures can perform a disappearing act by using specialized tissues in their bodies to manipulate the transmission and reflection of light, and now researchers at the University of California, Irvine have engineered human cells to have similar transparent abilities. In a paper published in Nature […]

One promising strategy to treat cancer is stimulating the body’s own immune system to attack tumors. However, tumors are very good at suppressing the immune system, so these types of treatments don’t work for all patients. MIT engineers have now come up with a way to boost the effectiveness of […]

In a population-based cohort study from Sweden and Denmark of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during 1969-2017 and matched reference individuals from the general population, Ola Olén, Jonas F Ludvigsson and colleagues found that IBD patients had an increased risk of small bowel cancer. The excess risks were especially […]

In most species, including our own, females live longer than males. Why this is the case is likely one of those simple questions that lacks a simple answer. At the root of it all are evolutionary pressures relating to sex-specific differences in mating strategy, but that says little about how and why an […]

One has to be cautious about studies in which metabolism is broken in some way, and symptoms of aging start to appear earlier as a result. Whether or not this has any relevance to normal aging is dependent on the fine details of the biochemistry involved, and can often be argued either […]

BCL-xL is a mitochondrial protein that acts to suppress the programmed cell death response of apoptosis, and is overexpressed in some cancers, as well as in senescent cells. Thus small molecules that bind to BCL-xL have been used as chemotherapeutics and more recently as senolytics that selectively destroy senescent cells. That removal of senescent cells is a legitimate rejuvenation therapy that quite literally turns back aging in animal […]

The anaesthetic drug ketamine has been shown, in low doses, to have a rapid effect on difficult-to-treat depression. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet now report that they have identified a key target for the drug: specific serotonin receptors in the brain. Their findings, which are published in Translational Psychiatry, give hope […]