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Telomeres are caps of repeated DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes. A little of the telomere length is lost with each cell division. A somatic cell with short telomeres ceases replication, and usually self-destructs. All cancers must thus continually lengthen telomeres in order to engage in unfettered replication and […]

Blue light is illuminating new understanding of a key signaling pathway in embryo development, tissue maintenance and cancer genesis. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed an approach using blue light to activate the Wnt (pronounced “wint”) signaling pathway in frog embryos. The pathway plays a wide variety of […]

The autoimmune disease lupus may be triggered by a defective process in the development of red blood cells (RBCs), according to a study led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. The discovery could lead to new methods for classifying and treating patients with this disease. The researchers, who published their […]

Researchers have in recent years put forward contradictory evidence for and against a role for persistent infection, such as by herpesviruses, in neurodegeneration and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease. The Alzheimer's disease scientific community is in need of a good explanation as to why only some people with the known […]

The aging of the vasculature has detrimental effects on organs throughout the body. The most structurally apparent issue is that of atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty deposits that narrow and weaken blood vessels. This ultimately leads to heart failure, stroke, heart attack, and death. A close second is the stiffening […]

Insilico Medicine announces the preclinical candidate for kidney fibrosis discovered using end-to-end artificial intelligence engine. Insilico Medicine, a global company specializing in the applications of the next-generation machine learning technologies for drug discovery and development, announced today that its AI-powered drug discovery platform had delivered the preclinical candidate (“PCC”) for […]

Pre-mRNA splicing in a subset of human short introns is governed by a distinct mechanism involving a new splicing factor. The interrupted non-coding regions in pre-mRNAs, termed “introns,” are excised by “splicing” to generate mature coding mRNAs that are translated into proteins. As human pre-mRNA introns vary in length, the […]

We have only one way to come out of this pandemic – vaccines. And yet many people are hesitant to take them, because of myths, anxiety, distrust of the pharmaceutical industry and actual cases of vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis. Now scientists from UCL have a better understanding of the […]

Cells become senescent in response to potentially cancer-inducing stresses and damage, to tissue injury, or when they reach the Hayflick limit on cellular replication. Senescent cells cease to replicate and secrete pro-inflammatory, pro-growth signals. They are cleared by the immune system or via programmed cell death mechanisms. Their presence is […]