Connective in Biological News

Origin of cells for connective tissues of skull and face challenged

... the origin of embryonic cells that give rise to connective and skeletal tissues that form the base of the ... that the neural crest gives rise to skeletal and connective tissue of the head and face, as well as a wide ... that caused abnormal development of skeletal and connective tissue of the head and face did not alter neural ...

Eat less or exercise more? Either way leads to more youthful hearts

... its original shape, sucking air back in. Similarly, the heart's muscle and connective tissue are elastic, and after ejecting blood to the body during ... stiffness of the left ventricle decreased, suggesting that the muscle and connective tissue of the heart more readily sprang back after the contraction phase. ...

New mechanical insights into wound healing and scar tissue formation

... play a critical role in the differentiation and function of fibroblasts, connective tissue cells that play a role in wound healing and scar tissue formation. ... the implant is too smooth, it never becomes properly incorporated into the connective tissue. But if it is too rough, scar tissue develops around it and it ...

Freshwater fish at the top of the food chain evolve more slowly

... examined museum specimens representing 29 species of centrarchid fishes. Using a chemical process to stain and visualize the bones, muscles, and connective tissue, they measured the fine parts of the head and mouth. "A fish mouth is much more complicated than our own mouth," says Wainwright. "Whereas we ...

Nanocrystals reveal activity within cells

... a real biological system, the Molecular Foundry team incubated the nanocrystals with embryonic mouse fibroblasts, cells crucial to the development of connective tissue, allowing the nanocrystals to be taken up into the interior of the cell. Live-cell imaging using the same near-infrared laser showed similarly ...

Crustacean shell with polyester creates mixed-fiber material for nerve repair

... nanometer-scale fibers, and then weaving the fibers together. The resulting material has a texture similar to that of the nanosized fibers of the connective tissue that surrrounds human cells. The two materials are different and are difficult to blend, but proper mixing is crucial because imperfectly ...

Scientists discover new genetic immune disorder in children

... of serious and potentially fatal symptoms that include swelling of bone tissue; bone pain and deformity; inflammation of the periosteum (a layer of connective tissue around bone); and a rash that can span from small individual pustules to extensive pustulosis that covers most of the patient's body. Most of ...

Liver disease 'shrunk' by blood-pressure drug

... hereditary and autoimmune diseases. Mechanism Liver damage, known as fibrosis, is caused by the unwanted accumulation of excess fibrous connective tissue which is produced and maintained by a specialised cell, the liver myofibroblast. In chronic liver disease a signalling pathway is created ...

Computer model predicts brain tumor growth and evolution

... basement membrane to invade adjacent tissue. A basement membrane is essentially boundary of a given tissue that separates cells from the surrounding connective tissue. Bearer said she hopes the research will allow doctors to find drug targets for glioma. She also envisions using the computational model to ...

WPI professor receives Fulbright Scholarship to work on tissue engineering in Ireland

... Excellence for Functional Biomaterials. Developing a detailed understanding of the relationship between the structure and mechanical functioning of connective tissue is critical to building engineered replacements for diseased tissue. In the research component of his Fulbright work, Billiar will seek to ...

Eye cells believed to be retinal stem cells are misidentified

... cells. Dyer said that a particularly promising alternative is the possibility of taking samples of adult cellssuch as fibroblasts that form connective tissuefrom a patient with retinal degeneration and exposing them to genetic cues that induce them to revert to stem cells. Those induced pluripotent ...

Research yields potential target for cancer, wound healing and fibrosis

... the role of the beta-1 integrin tail in cell spreading and the production of fibronectin fibrils. Fibronectin is an anchorage protein present in connective tissues and it helps wound healing when it is deposited in damaged tissue. Cells can use their integrins to stretch fibronectin along their surface ...

Lab-on-a-chip homes in on how cancer cells break free

... engineering doctoral student in Searson's lab, used the device to perform and record movies of the live-cell experiments. Wildt tested cells from the connective tissue of mice during these experiments, but the team plans to try other types of cells in the future. "In the movies, you can see that the cell ...

Genetic abnormality may increase risk of blood disorders

... affect an estimated 140,000 people in the US carry the JAK2 mutation and suffer from the overproduction of red blood cells, platelets, or fibrous connective tissue. According to the authors, understanding the underlying inherited sequence partly explains the predisposition for acquiring mutations in ...

Reducing the damage of a heart attack

... medicine from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wis. Dr. Greenspan determined how the main component of connective tissue, collagen, interacts with the sFRP2 protein, and how these molecules play a crucial role in scar formation. "With many injuries and ...

From sheet metal elements to host cells: DFG launches 10 new collaborative research centers

... deals with an extremely important scientific and clinical topic. Researchers at several sites study fibroses, i.e. the pathological growth of connective tissue in the liver and kidneys. This type of scarring can often lead to death and is also expensive to treat. The new project aims to decipher the ...

Case Western Reserve receives Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging award

... One cell population of particular interest to Alsberg is mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). They have the remarkable ability to change into different connective tissue cells when presented with specific signals. "The award from The Ellison Medical Foundation is going to help my lab determine how MSCs from ...

Toxic bile damages the liver

... is missing, the liver cells are exposed to the toxic components of the bile, resulting in cirrhosis of liver, a transformation of liver cells into connective tissue with a gradual loss of liver function. This could explain some of the cases of liver cirrhosis of unknown origin and open up a new approach ...

Salk researchers successfully reprogram keratinocytes attached to a single hair

... liver and intestinal cells), skin fibroblasts were the only human cell type they had ever tried their hands on. Fibroblasts help make the connective tissue in the body and are the primary cell type in the deeper layers of the skin, where they are responsible for wound healing and the secretion of ...

FSU researcher's discovery leads to $1.5 million grant, potential new treatment of liver fibrosis

... refers to the accumulation of excess scar tissue in the liver through excess deposits of collagen, a fibrous protein found in skin, bone, and other connective tissues. The formation of scar tissue is a normal bodily response to injury, but in fibrosis the scarring begins to accumulate to unacceptable ....

Closing the gap: Journal launch brings together wound-healing knowledge

... Until now, controversy has existed as to the exact cell type that produces connective tissue growth factor (CTGF), a key protein in the wound healing process. This knowledge gap is closed in a paper featured in the first issue of ...

Alcohol consumption can cause too much cell death, fetal abnormalities

... damage results from the death of neural crest cells, versatile cells that travel a lot during development, ultimately helping form bone, cartilage, connective tissue, the heart and more. These cells are developing at the same time as neural tube cells that form the brain and spinal cord. Consequently, the ...

The aorta is torn apart in the Marfan syndrome

... 1:5000 and 1:10000 and is either hereditary or the result of spontaneous genetic mutations. As a consequence, there are changes in the consistency of connective tissue. Symptoms develop in the cardiovascular system, the eyes, and the skeleton. A much feared and potentially fatal complication is that the aorta ...

Dartmouth researchers discover gene signatures for scleroderma

... of a poorly understood and hard to treat illness and opens a window for better diagnosis and targeted therapies. Scleroderma is a chronic connective tissue disorder that can cause skin hardening and internal organ dysfunction and affects four times as many women as men. It captures a range of ...

New source of heart stem cells discovered

... marked by Wt1 expression, not only differentiated into cardiomyocytes, but also smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells and fibroblasts (found in connective tissue). "If you're going to regenerate a tissue, you need to regenerate the whole tissue, not just the cardiomyocytes," said Pu. "This ...

Geisinger study: Inflammatory disease causes blindness

... DANVILLE, PA. People suffering from a type of connective tissue disease characterized by inflammation of arteries in the head are three times more likely to experience blindness, new Geisinger research ...

Cells lining milk ducts hold key to spread of common form of breast cancer

... mice, DCIS tumors arose, but they were confined to the ducts. When they injected MCFDCIS cells and fibroblasts -- cells found in milk ducts and other connective tissue -- the resulting DCIS tumors broke into the walls of the ducts. "These findings made it clear that fibroblasts promote tumor growth and ...

New computer applications allow to classify Iberian pig meat automatically

... pig, lamb, cow of the Galician Blonde breed, Kobe ox and pigeon. The designed application permitted to quantify automatically the intramuscular connective tissue and the retraction of the muscular fibres in images taken by a system or artificial vision coupled to a microscopy. Second, the study has ...

Menstrual blood -- a valuable source of multipotential stem cells?

... unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source menstrual blood. Stromal stem cells - cells that are present in connective tissues - have recently been identified in endometrial tissues of the uterus. When the fresh growth of tissue and blood vessels is shed during each ...

Potential new target for multiple sclerosis therapy

... called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs, collagenase-2 is MMP8), a large group of enzymes that break down collagen and other components of the body's connective tissue. MMPs have been implicated in contributing to MS by degrading the tissue that maintains the blood-brain barrier, thus allowing unwanted cells ...

Tumor-targeting viral therapy slows neuroblastoma, malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors

... treatments to help improve outcomes for patients with high-risk neuroblastoma. Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors are cancers affecting the connective tissue surrounding nerves. The first-line treatment is surgical removal with chemotherapy or radiotherapy used as auxiliary therapies. ...

Stroke victims may benefit from stem cell transplants

... novel stroke therapies, said Song. BMSCs migrate to damaged brain tissue, improve neural function In a joint Canadian, Chinese study, BMSCs - connective tissue cells - were injected into animals 24 hours following middle cerebral artery occlusion. Using laser scanning confocal microscopy to track ...

Evolutionary comparison finds new human genes

... to identify the proteins by comparison with databases of known proteins. The discovered genes mainly have to do with motor activity, cell adhesion, connective tissue and central nervous system development, functions that might be expected to be common to many different creatures. The entire project, from ...

Simple recipe turns human skin cells into embryonic stem cell-like cells

... cells taken from embryonic or adult mice the pluripotency normally reserved for embryonic stem cells. Fibroblasts make up structural fibers found in connective tissue. Those four factors are transcripton factors, meaning that they control the activity of other genes. They were also known to play a role in ...

Brown scientists take the petri dish to new dimensions

... of hundreds of cells, even of different types. In Tissue Engineering, the Brown team describes how they combined human fibroblasts, which make connective tissue, and endothelial cells, which line the heart and blood vessels. The cells came together to form spheres and doughnut-shaped clusters. The ...

American Chemical Society's Weekly Press Pac

... now rely on material obtained from slaughterhouse waste, according to researchers. Collagen is a component of skin, tendon, bone, cartilage and connective tissue of humans and other animals. Gelatin derived from collagen is a jelly-like substance used in a wide array of food products, ranging from ice ...

High blood pressure, low energy -- a recipe for heart failure

... the researchers observed signs of early heart failure: the mouse hearts dilated and didn't contract effectively, the heart walls thinned, fibrous connective tissue accumulated and some heart cells died. They also saw that the hearts had depleted fuel reserves. Kelly indicates that these studies show for ...

Researcher uncovers details of how cancer spreads

... Cell (Vol. 9, August 2005) reveals how connective tissue holding a cancer cell in place might ... accumulates on the cell surface, it degrades the connective tissue that holds the cancerous cell in place. ... an enzyme called MMP2, which further degrades the connective tissue. In this way, the cancer cell loses its ...

Math model predicts cancer behavior

... these include the oxygen and nutrient concentrations and the landscape of connective tissue that surrounds the cells. They were surprised to find that the ... off in the middle of tumor growth, what if we change the landscape of connective tissue" "By doing this we discovered new things that we didn't know ...