Nuclei in Biological News

UCSD researchers make first direct observations of biological particles in high-altitude ice clouds

... between residues of water droplets and ice nuclei in real-time. Ice nuclei are rarer than droplet nuclei and are more likely to create precipitation. ...

Stanford scientists turn adult skin cells into muscle and vice versa

... muscle cells together, producing cells that had nuclei from human skin cells and mouse muscle cells. By ... cell wall, the human skin cells and mouse muscle nuclei could now "talk" to one another via chemical ... looked at the genes expressed from the human skin nuclei and mouse muscle nuclei. (This was possible ...

When every photon counts

... mammals. With this unique arrangement, the rod nuclei of nocturnal mammals act as micro-lenses that ... Computer simulations show that stacks of such nuclei effectively guide the light to the ... mammals the chromatin arrangement in the rod nuclei is inverted: Here the heterochromatin is lumped ...

Lamin A/C deficiency is 'unnerving'

... hundreds of nuclei. In normal fibers, several nuclei cluster together under the cell membrane at sites of neuronal contact. These postsynaptic nuclei synthesize the components of the neuromuscular ... cause Emery-Dreifuss disease) failed to position nuclei into these postsynaptic clusters. This prevented ...

Dancing atoms now understood

... of subatomic particles called "spin". The nuclei of many atoms, most notably hydrogen, spin like ... For MRI, it is the interaction of the nuclei with the magnetic field that is key, as magnetic ... measurements, scientists often need to invert the nuclei so they are aligned against the magnetic field. ...

New discovery may enhance MRI scans, lead to portable MRI machines

... Bathed in the magnetic field, atomic nuclei within water and other molecules throughout cells ... process done in MRI scans that realigns the nuclei so they are against the magnetic field. When all is said and done, inverting the nuclei of people inside MRI scanners can reveal such ...

Anabolic steroids provide a competitive edge in power lifting years after doping has ended

... used. The use of anabolic steroids can add more nuclei to the muscle, and enhance muscle fiber size. ... the muscle fiber area intensity, the number of nuclei per fiber in the quadriceps was still comparable ... high-intensity trained athletes and the number of nuclei per fiber was even higher than found in the ...

Inflammation triggers cell fusions that could protect neurons, Stanford research shows

... of Medicine. After the fusion, the blood-cell nuclei begin to express previously silent, ... was a cross-species experiment that showed nuclei from rat blood stem cells that had fused to ... under certain conditions, and that these nuclei can even be reprogrammed." ...

Airborne bacteria may play large role in precipitation

... away as Russia to show that the most active ice nuclei are actually biological in origin. nuclei are the seeds around which ice is formed. Snow ... can also serve as ice nuclei. But biological ice nuclei are different from dust and ...

LSU scientist finds evidence of 'rain-making' bacteria

... and demonstrated that the most active ice nuclei a substrate that enhances the formation of ice ... can serve as ice nuclei, but biological ice nuclei are capable of catalyzing freezing at much warmer ... If present in clouds, biological ice nuclei may affect the processes that trigger ...

NMR researchers unlock hydrogen's secrets to spot polymorphism in pharmaceuticals

... the standard technique looks at the carbon 13C nuclei in the drugs by a method called ... insensitive technique as only 1 in 100 carbon nuclei are the 13C isotope. This means that 99 out of 100 carbon nuclei are a NMR-invisible form of carbon. Only ...

Stem cell nuclei are soft 'hard drives,' Penn study finds

... of Pennsylvania have discovered that the nuclei of human stem cells are particularly soft and ... access and expression. Researchers pulled cell nuclei into microscopic glass tubes under controlled ... fluorescence microscopy. The study showed that nuclei in human embryonic stem cells were the most ...

New nucleotide could revolutionize epigenetics

... during investigations of the level of 5-methylcytosine in the very large nuclei of Purkinje cells, says Skirmantas Kriaucionis, a postdoctoral associate ... function in the cerebellum. After developing a new method to separate the nuclei of individual cell types from one another, Kriaucionis was analyzing the ...

8 National Medals of Science awardees to be honored at gala, then the White House

... preparation of evaluated reviews and summaries of what is known about the nuclei with mass numbers 5 to 20. These include isotopes of hydrogen, helium, ... the spectroscopy of the light nuclei; that is, the ways in which these nuclei absorb and emit energy. Ajzenberg-Selove is the author of "Nuclear ...

AGU journal highlights -- July 23, 2008

... change cloud properties through particles acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nuclei (IN), a pathway referred to as the "indirect aerosol effect." This effect ...

CU-Boulder worm study sheds light on human aging, inherited diseases

... The research suggests that the worms' cells receive signals from their nuclei as DNA problems are sensed and not, as previously thought, from their disrupted mitochondrial power sources. The signal-sending nuclei order cells to shut down DNA replication, allowing them time to fix ...

New, more direct pathways from outside the cell-to-cell nuclei discovered

... the existence of direct pathways between extracellular material and cell nuclei will be published on August 10, 2007 in Cell Motility and the ... remained unable to systematically search for phagosome clusters around nuclei until he received NSF funding in 2006 to purchase a confocal microscope, ...

From the glass to the brain in 6 minutes

... alcohol content of 0.05 to 0.06 percent a level that impairs ability to drive, but does not induce severe intoxication. In the MRI scanner, the nuclei of atoms in brain tissue were stimulated by a high-frequency impulse and the signal transmitted during the return to the initial condition was ...

'Disordered' amino acids may really be there to provide wiggle room for signaling protein

... used a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which can determine a protein's shape by measuring how the individual atomic nuclei of a protein interact with an intense magnetic field. Since NMR spectroscopy works best with small proteins not large flexible molecules like ...

Protein structure determined in living cells

... proteins are extracted from the cell, purified, and analyzed in single crystals or in solution. NMR spectroscopy detects signals from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms that are ubiquitous in organic molecules. Measurements in the living cell are challenging because it is difficult to distinguish ...

Internationally acclaimed researcher joins UH faculty thanks to $5.5 million grant

... potential," he said. Gustafsson is revered worldwide for his translational research on nuclear receptors, a class of proteins found in cell nuclei that capture hormone molecules and interact with and control the expression of genes. Research in this field is vital in developing treatments for ...

Weizmann Institute scientists show extra copies of a gene carry extra risk

... brains of these mice were a bit smaller than average. On closer inspection, they discovered a range of subtle changes in cell polarity and movement: nuclei within the proliferating zone tended to move faster, but with less control; rates of cell death were higher; and various factors in the cell became ...

Researchers 'unzip' molecules to measure interactions keeping DNA packed in cells

... the molecules that contain genetic information are nucleic acids often illustrated as long, thin strands of double helices. DNA fits inside cell nuclei by being wound like thread around proteins called histones, forming tightly packed bundles called nucleosomes. But that same DNA must often be ...

CSHL scientists clarify editing error underlying genetic neurodegenerative disease

... why the mutation causes a defect in an essential cellular function called RNA splicing. RNA splicing is an essential step in the process in cell nuclei whereby instructions encoded in DNA are transcribed to RNA copies, which subsequently leave the nucleus to serve as templates for the cellular ...

Heavy pyridine crystallizes differently

... This release is available in German . The nuclei of ordinary hydrogen atoms contain only a single proton. If a neutron is added, the hydrogen becomes deuterium. In principle, molecules that contain ...

Persistent pollutant may promote obesity

... the cellular components known as retinoid X receptors (RXRs) in a range of species are a recent discovery. When activated, RXRs can migrate into the nuclei of cells and switch on genes that cause the growth of fat storage cells and regulate whole body metabolism; compounds that affect a related receptor ...

Cell movements totally modular, Stanford study shows

... cells away: They were looking to see the movements of individual cells and overall sheet movements as cells filled the open space. "We stained the nuclei and took a movie under a microscope and watched what they did over a 15- to 20-hour period," said Vitorino. "That's when we noticed the cells moving ...

The structure of the Mre11 protein bound to DNA

... loops. Mre11 from eukaryotes organisms including yeast, frogs, and humans, whose cells, unlike archaea and bacteria, have membrane-packaged nuclei exhibit only five of these recognition loops but are otherwise similar. How Mre11 works The ends of the two DNA helices in the synaptic ...

Moderate quantities of dirt make more rain

... more precipitation; after the peak, additional aerosols reduce the precipitation. The curve reaches maximum concentration at 1,200 condensation nuclei per cubic centimetre of air - the equivalent to the volume of a sugar cube. At this concentration, natural and man-made aerosols screen off around a ...

News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience

... plasticity as they age. 3. Preventing Programmed Cell Death In Vivo Christopher K. Thompson and Eliot A. Brenowitz The size of song nuclei in some songbirds varies with seasonal changes in androgen levels, growing during the reproductive season and then shrinking via neurodegeneration. ...

New paradigm for cell-specific gene delivery

... have discovered a new way to limit gene transfer and expression to specific tissues in animals. In studies to determine how plasmids enter the nuclei of non-dividing cells, the group previously identified a region of a smooth muscle cell-specific promoter that was able to mediate nuclear targeting ...

Tracking prions

... (NMR), the team was able to get a closer look at this protein. NMR allows for the evaluation of interactions of the nuclear spins of specific atomic nuclei with each other and their chemical surroundings, which gives information about the structure and dynamics of molecules and molecular fragments. ...

Scientists clarify a mechanism of epigenetic inheritance

... chemical modifications of DNA, that complicate the study of more complex animals and plants. Long DNA molecules almost miraculously cram into cell nuclei that are almost a million times smaller than they are. They do so by wrapping around proteins called histones, which array themselves along the ...

Particle accelerator may reveal shape of alternate dimensions

... accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operating later this year near Geneva, Switzerland. In an accelerator, smashing atomic nuclei head-on at nearly the speed of light can briefly create new high-energy and highly unstable particles, which quickly decay into a shower of ...

Research sheds light on the mechanics of gene transcription

... machinery assembles at the called-upon locus, regardless of its position in the nucleus. To test the generality of the findings beyond polytene nuclei to common (but much smaller and more difficult to test) diploid cells, the researchers used a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridization, ...

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards prestigious fellowships to 17 top young investigators

... spatial organization of chromosomes within the nucleus - a fundamental question that will provide insight into the causes of morphological changes in nuclei of leukemias and lymphomas. Dipali G. Sashital, PhD , with her sponsor Jennifer A. Doudna, PhD, at the University of California, Berkeley, ...

Using nanotechnology, UCLA researchers discover cancer cells 'feel' much softer than normal cells

... microscope after the cells are fixed and stained with chemicals, which is really an antiquated method, Rao said. Usually the cancer cells have larger nuclei and other subtle features. However, the normal cells from body cavity fluids can look almost identical to cancer cells under an optical microscope. ...

New approach builds better proteins inside a computer

... using both x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy analyzes the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei in molecules to gain insight into their structure. While both techniques are highly useful in analyzing protein structure, the data they yield have ...

Paradigm shift in Alzheimers's research: new treatments

... astrogliosis develops together with the neuronal loss. Cholinergic deficits Moreover, we have studied the neuron loss in different cholinergic nuclei and found that cholinergic neurons degenerate as a function of intraneuronal A"X-42 accumulation. This finding may explain cholinergic deficits in AD ...

First finding of a metabolite in 1 sex only

... whole tissue, Kleps observed an unusual signal in the gill tissue of male blue crabs that was absent in females. NMR can be measured in the nuclei of certain isotopes, including hydrogen-1, carbon-13 and phosphorus-31, whose atoms resonate at characteristic frequencies in a magnetic field. The ...