Spleen in Biological News

Gene switch sites found mainly on 'shores,' not just 'islands' of the human genome

... comprehensive survey in human brain, liver and spleen tissues obtained from five autopsies, identifying ... they'd located in the normal brain, liver and spleen tissues they had examined. "This suggests that ... cancerous might start to act like brain, liver or spleen cells. They're losing the characteristics they ...

Weill Cornell science briefs June/July 2008

... to regain fine-motor control. Avoiding spleen Removal for Cooley's Anemia Sufferers Weill ... of malformed red blood cells within the body. The spleen works to filter out these unhealthy cells in ... harm, such as in a stroke, but eventually the spleen becomes over-stuffed and is commonly surgically ...

Avoiding Spleen Removal for Cooley's Anemia SufferersAvoiding spleen removal for Cooley's anemia suf

... of malformed red blood cells within the body. The spleen works to filter out these unhealthy cells in ... harm, such as in a stroke, but eventually the spleen becomes over-stuffed and is commonly surgically ... potentially fatal burst. Unfortunately, after the spleen is removed, patients are at a much greater risk ...

Mice stressed in simulated weightlessness show organ atrophy

... the Rutgers researchers should look at the spleen and thymus the organs responsible for most of the animals immune cells. If stress affects the spleen and thymus so that they atrophy, the immune ... said. We had no basis to expect this, but the spleen and thymus of the OPN-deficient animals remained ...

Penn researchers demonstrate a new model for drug discovery with a fluorescent anesthetic

... identified 1-AMA in a screen for compounds that bind to a cavity in horse spleen apoferritin, HSAF, that Eckenhoff and co-workers have shown to bind ... constant, Kd 0.1 mM, for binding to the general anesthetic site in horse spleen apoferritin, meaning the compound is behaving as traditional general ...

Scientists discover 21st century plague

... serious illness in humans worldwide from heart disease to infection of the spleen and nervous system. "A new species called Bartonella rochalimae was recently discovered in a patient with an enlarged spleen who had travelled to South America," said Professor Chao-Chin Chang from ...

The reservoir of Marburg virus identified in a species of fruit bat

... performed on the bats captured: detection of viral RNA in the liver and spleen by various methods of nucleotide amplification; a search for Marburg ... genome fragments on 283 specimens of R. aegyptiacus showed the liver and spleen of four of them to contain RNA sequences belonging to 3 different Marburg ...

Alzheimer's, asthma, cancer, malaria and TB focus of new Singapore grants

... yearly. "A key challenge to successful malaria intervention is our limited understanding of how the malarial parasite evades detection by the spleen our immune system's control centre," said Dr. Preiser. "With this grant, we will use new imaging tools to visualise and measure how many parasites ...

Fireflies and jellyfish help illuminate quest for cause of infertility

... prolactin throughout the body. This included the pituitary gland, the thymus an organ in the chest which helps protect against autoimmunity the spleen and inflammatory cells in the abdominal cavity. ...

Lancet study supports new, highly effective treatment for blood disorder

... weight gain. Other common treatments include IV anti-D and IV gammaglobulin, and also rituximab. More drastic measures, like surgical removal of the spleen (splenectomy) are sometimes taken in order to prevent the body from destroying platelet cells within the organ. However, this may put a patient at ...

Gene therapy corrects sickle cell disease in laboratory study

... The resulting clogged blood vessels can lead to cognitive dysfunction by causing small strokes in the brain and cause damage to kidneys, liver, spleen and lungs. The only permanent cure for the disease is a bone marrow transplant to give recipients blood-forming cells that will form normal ...

Battling bacteria in the blood: Researchers tackle deadly infections

... in the body during different stages of the infection, and how quickly they were killed and cleared from the body. The liver, lung and spleen had the highest concentrations, and the lung appeared to have the most effective bacteria-killing system. Some of the mice were given a ...

Research exposes new target for malaria drugs

... cell, they send out clusters of sticky proteins to the cell surface, enabling them to attach to blood vessels and escape destruction by the host's spleen while they replicate. This tactic can be especially problematic during pregnancy as malaria-infected RBCs congregate in the vessel-rich placenta ...

Biology of Reproduction highlights

... 158 maternal cells per 100,000 neonatal cells in fetal mice, with preferential homing of these cells to fetal heart and lung, compared to liver and spleen (although other work cited indicated preferential migration of maternal cells to immunologically active organs including thymus, spleen, liver, and ...

New data from NIH lab confirms protocol to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice

... new evidence that adult precursor cells from the spleen can contribute to the regeneration of beta cells. ... disease but were inconclusive on the role of spleen cells in the recovery of insulin-producing ... to reverse type 1 diabetes and on the role of the spleen cells in islet regeneration. "This data from ...

A transplant in time

... had made little headway due to the fact that the spleen is home to the immune system's T cells ?cells ... causing the host to reject them. By taking spleen tissue from embryonic pigs over the course of ... Thus, the scientists fixed the ideal time for spleen transplantation at 42 days. Hemophiliac mice ...

A protein in the eye may prevent immune response and protect eyes from disease

... substances) from the eye to the spleen, the spleen stimulates the production of what is known as a ... when foreign substances were presented to the spleen by antigen presenting cells that did not have ... and its exclusion from T cell zones in the spleen suggests that F4/80 expression and immune ...

Spleen may be source of versatile stem cells

... Hospital (MGH) researchers discovered that the spleen might be a source of adult stem cells that could ... new islets. The result suggested that the adult spleen - previously regarded as playing a fairly ... development - including the formation of the spleen - but it was not known to be present in adults ...

Einstein researchers demonstrate a novel approach to treating AIDS

... human white blood cells into the spleens of immune-deficient mice. (The spleen was chosen because the overwhelming majority of HIV-1-infected cells in humans are present in the spleen and other lymphoid tissues; and the absence of an immune system meant the ...

New bacterium discovered -- related to cause of trench fever

... Journal of Medicine.” The woman had been traveling in the Peruvian Andes. She suffered from potentially life-threatening anemia, an enlarged spleen and a high fever for several weeks, as do victims of malaria and typhoid. The Andes are also home to another Bartonella species, spread by sand ....

How 'memory' T cells curb the spread of viruses throughout the body

... lymph node. “In fact we found that memory CD8 T cells already killed target cells in the lymph node and decreased viral spread to the liver and spleen when the virus just barely started to multiply.” Thus, memory CD8 T cells do not prevent infection; but prevent disease partly because they curb ...

8 plants from South Africa may hold potential for treating high blood pressure

... the researchers examined 16 plants to identify ACE inhibitor activity. The plants were: Amaranthus dubius, a flowering plant also known as spleen amaranth Amaranthus hybridus, commonly known as smooth pigweed or slim amaranth Amaranthus spinosus, also known as spiny amaranth ...

Common blood test can help distinguish between mononucleosis and tonsillitis

... in differentiating patients with tonsillitis from those with glandular fever [mononucleosis] is the prevention of spontaneous rupture of the spleen and acute intra-abdominal hemorrhage," potential complications of mononucleosis, the authors write. Currently, distinguishing between them requires ...

The power of one: A simpler, cheaper method for cell fusion

... them to become destabilized and fuse together. In one of electrofusion's applications, scientists can fuse antibody-producing cells from the spleen (beta cells) with cancer cells in order to create a virtually immortal, antibody-producing hybrid, called a hybridoma. By manipulating the beta cells ...

New treatment for severe malaria

... glue. The challenge facing scientists has been to break these bonds so that the infected blood cells can be transported by the blood stream into the spleen and destroyed. The research group, which is headed by Professor Mats Wahlgren, has now developed a substance that prevents infected blood cells ...

Scientists discover new regulating mechanism in cells

... biosciences and a researcher with the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center . The study shows, for example, that when RHA is knocked out, the spleen necrosis virus, a retrovirus Boris-Lawrie and her collaborators were studying as a vector for gene therapy, was unable to make certain proteins. ...

Newly discovered killer cell fights cancer

... "IKDC" for interferon-producing killer dendritic cell, has been missed by cancer biologists because it is rare, making up one-tenth of cells in the spleen with similar features, such as other dendritic cells, according to Frank Housseau, Ph.D., research associate at Hopkins' Kimmel Cancer Center and ...

Visceral Leishmaniasis: Successful Vaccine Trial In Dogs

... eventually burst, releasing the parasites which move on to penetrate other cells. The infected subject suffers bouts of fever, anaemia, enlarged spleen and liver, and weight loss. In the absence of treatment, these clinical signs usually announce a fatal outcome. The sand fly sucks blood from ...

Recombinant DNA technology may enable oral, rather than injectable, delivery of protein drugs

... transported across the GI tract to the blood stream," Shen says. "Humans naturally produce transferrin to move iron through the blood to the liver, spleen and bone marrow. It has been used to carry some protein-based drugs in a piggy-back fashion to their necessary site of action." The next step, ...

Studies reveal how plague disables immune system, and how to exploit the process to make a vaccine

... bacteria. Two days after the mice were infected, their spleens were filled with bacteria. Although the overwhelming majority of immune cells in the spleen are B cells or T cells, nearly all of the infected cells were macrophages, neutrophils or dendritic cells. These cells make up what immunologists ...

Natural Killers Could Lead to New Hepatitis Treatments

... was that these NKT cells just move within the sinusoids intravascularly,?said Littman. By contrast, he said, immune cells in the lymph nodes and spleen perform their surveillance ensconced within specialized compartments shielded from the turmoil of the bloodstream. “In this case, it looks like NKT ...

Iron exporter revealed that may explain common human disorder

... transfer survived but quickly became anemic after birth due to iron deficiency in the blood. Examination of the animals' intestine, liver, and spleen revealed an accumulation of iron within cells, indicating an inability of cells to release iron once absorbed. Mice lacking ferroportin only in ...