Deprived of a sense of smell, worms live longer

... have shown that they can extend the life spans of roundworms even when the worms are well fed it just takes a ... professor of developmental biology. "Like roundworms that are grown in a food-scarce environment, the ... their metabolism and life span." If roundworms sense that food is abundant, their metabolism ...

New regulatory mechanism discovered for cell identify and behavior in forming organs

... processes in adult animals. Parts of the Wnt pathway have been conserved between species during the long course of evolution, all the way from simple roundworms to humans. Previous research in Xenopus has established that a low level of activity from a molecule called B-catenin which promotes cell-to-cell ...

Worm genome offers clues to evolution of parasitism

... ecological niche: it lives together with oriental beetles in the United States and Japan in order to devour the bacteria, fungi and other small roundworms that grow on beetle carcasses after they have died. While the beetles are alive and the nematodes' food source is scarce, the worms live in a ...

NIH extends commitment to transformative research with 2008 Pioneer, New Innovator Awards

... Salk Institute for Biological Studies assistant professor of chemical biology and proteomics, who will design and incorporate novel amino acids in roundworms to study how a class of proteins transmits signals regulating development and cancer. Joseph C. Wu, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University School of ...

Consortium develops new method enabling routine targeted gene modification

... types of cells. "Recent work has shown that ZFNs can alter genes with high efficiency in cells from plants or model organisms like fruitflies, roundworms and zebrafish, and in human cells," says J. Keith Joung, MD, PhD, of the MGH Molecular Pathology Unit, the paper's senior author. "However, a ...

Eliminating germline lengthens fly lifespan, Brown study shows

... ago by acclaimed aging biologist Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco. Kenyon found that eliminating germline stem cells in roundworms extended their lifespan. We wanted to see if Kenyons findings could be duplicated in the fly, said Marc Tatar, the senior scientist on the project ...

Poor Americans in the United States suffer hidden burden of parasitic and other neglected diseases

... diseases above, significant numbers of American schoolchildren living in poor areas may also be infected with other parasites, including Ascaris roundworms in the South, Strongyloides threadworms in Appalachia, Leishmania protozoan parasites in Texas, and the bacteria that cause leptospirosis. "That ...

US-French research team to barcode an entire ecosystem

... principal investigator on the grant. "A model ecosystem approach to ecology will benefit conservation much like model organisms - from fruit flies to roundworms - in molecular biology have benefited medicine. There is a great deal of insight researchers can obtain about very complex systems by first studying ...

Brain size may depend upon how neural cells are cleaved

... to cleave one way or another, said Tsai. Studies in fruit flies and roundworms had hinted that major regulatory molecules called heterotrimeric G ... Gβγ is regulated. Studies on asymmetric cell division in fruit flies and roundworms had implicated a particular class of proteins -- known as AGS3 and mPins ...

UCSD discovery may help extend life of natural pesticide

... at the University of California, San Diego has discovered a molecule in roundworms that makes them susceptible to Bacillus thuringiensis toxin, or Bt ... This work furthermore opens up the possibility of using Bt toxins against roundworms that parasitize humans. "These parasites infect nearly one-third of the ...

Bird sex is something else

... In mammals, mismatched doses of X genes between males and females threaten to upset the gene network in one or both sexes. Fruit flies (Drosophila), roundworms (C. elegans) and humans each work around this dosage problem using different molecular pathways. By contrast, for birds it appears that most genes on ...

Common molecular 'signature' identified in solid tumors

... compared to their cousins, messenger RNA, which can be several hundred to a thousand times that long. But several years ago, researchers studying roundworms noted that properly functioning miRNA was necessary for normal development. Since then, scientists in laboratories around the world have identified ...

Common molecular 'signature' identified in solid tumors

... compared to their cousins, messenger RNA, which can be several hundred to a thousand times that long. But several years ago, researchers studying roundworms noted that properly functioning miRNA was necessary for normal development. Since then, scientists in laboratories around the world have identified ...

Possible treatment found for 'chemobrain'

... of the Anopheles genome. The roundworm genome is important because its sequence will aid in comparative annotation of the genomes of other roundworms that have been sequenced, including that of Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most important model systems for understanding animal development. In ...

NHGRI Selects 13 More Organisms for Genome Sequencing

... of the Anopheles genome. The roundworm genome is important because its sequence will aid in comparative annotation of the genomes of other roundworms that have been sequenced, including that of Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most important model systems for understanding animal development. In ...

Fluorescing lab worms signal longer life spans

... to find what makes an animal robust to many different insults." Johnson authored a milestone paper in 1988 showing that mutating a single gene in roundworms could double their life span -- the first evidence that the lifespan of an animal could be increased by genetic alteration. Since then, researchers ...

New understanding of cell movement may yield ways to brake cancer's spread

... directed cell migration. The experiments were conducted in several widely used laboratory models, but the molecule exists in nearly all animals, from roundworms to mammals, and likely has a conserved function throughout species. Knowing exactly what triggers cellular migration can help develop treatments that ...

Signs of aging: Scientists evaluate genes associated with longevity

... and Dr. Donald Riddle, Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri, the team prepared SAGE (serial analysis of gene expression) libraries from roundworms that contained a mutated form of the daf-2 gene, which is a principal lifespan-determining factor in C. elegans. Worms that lack fully functional ...

“Nano-scissors?laser shows precise surgical capability

... section a single axon (the "arms" of a neuron) with great precision : An ultra-short pulse laser that can perform extremely precise surgery on tiny roundworms may be the key to understanding nerve regeneration and is an important step toward treatment of human neurological disease, according to research ...