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Tag: "altered" at biology news

Scientists force viruses to evolve as better delivery vehicles for gene therapy

...cks, two of which were responsible for most of the altered interaction with antibodies. "Starting from scratch, just trying to rationally decide which two amino acid changes to make on the virus, there is no way you would have guessed those two," Schaffer said. "Using the same algorithm as nature came up wi...

A clue from macaques yields evidence for impaired retroviral defense genes in humans

...an groups to screen human populations for slightly altered versions of TRIM5 that might be able to resist HIV infection. Unexpectedly, the researchers found a single mutation in TRIM5 that impairs its ability to defend against retroviruses. This mutation occurs at a very high frequency in some ethnic group...

Insects and mammals share common fat-building pathway, study suggests

...g might have utility in human metabolic disease of altered adiposity, such as obesity and lipodystrophy," agreed Evan Rosen of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in a commentary. But, not so fast, he added. "Though seemingly obvious--anything that causes fewer fat cells should reduce weight gain and its c...

Scientists re-engineer a well-known antibiotic to counter drug resistance

...ics; in this case, a single atom in vancomycin was altered to counter an analogous single atom change in the ...s, Boger added, suggest that no matter how the VRE altered the cell wall component, it was still sensitive to treatment by the re-engineered vancomycin analogu...

Two NIH initiatives launch intensive efforts to find roots of common diseases

...en only slightly. The combination of many slightly altered genes may significantly increase the risk of a specific disease, but identifying such a complex set of genetics changes is challenging. Finding these disease-causing variants is one of the highest priorities of current biomedical research. "Virtual...

Scientists discover basic defect in cystic fibrosis airway glands

... researchers found no evidence that the inhibitors altered secretion rates in either normal or cystic fibrosis glands. This suggested that loss of CFTR-mediated fluid secretion is the culprit in cystic fibrosis. "We previously showed that cystic fibrosis airway glands have defective gland secretion in resp...

Front-line immune cells mature in four stages, study shows

...lymph tissue and whether patients with cancer have altered NK cell development." Scientists have known for some time that cells with a protein called CD34 on their surface can give rise to NK cells. They also knew that mature NK cells lack CD34. But how and where the CD34-bearing cells became mature NK cel...

How nerve cells stay in shape

...A makes it to the synapse - this could explain its altered shape. "We wanted to know if Staufen2-deficient nerve cells can still transmit signals," explains Michael Kiebler. In order to determine this, researchers collaborated with Stefan Boehm's group at the Medical University of Vienna's Institute of Phar...

Engineered mouse mimics cognitive aspects of schizophrenia

...e machinery, the researchers created a genetically altered mouse strain in which dopamine receptors were overexpressed only in the striatum. What's more, they engineered the mouse strain so that they could shut down this overexpression by giving the mice the antibiotic doxycycline. The researchers found tha...

Novel molecular 'signature' marks DNA of embryonic stem cells

...e initial epigenetic state is established and then altered during development has implications not only for stem cell biology, but also for cancer and other diseases where epigenetic defects are implicated," Bernstein said. A related study led by Rick Young, a member of the Whitehead Institute and an assoc...

Cholesterol gets 'thumbs up' for role in digit development

...adient, Chiang and colleagues created mice with an altered form of the Sonic hedgehog protein to which cholesterol cannot attach. They found that mice lacking cholesterol-modified Sonic hedgehog developed with malformed and ectopic, or out of place, digits. The second, or "index,"digits were stunted and mis...

Growing crops to cope with climate change

...be answering questions about how we can live in an altered climate. Research such as this helps to present answers to some of these problems." ...

Discovery of new molecular tools for biosynthesis could lead to advances in use of pectin

...s to discover gene sequences, could be genetically altered pectins that might dramatically improve plant species' ability to fight disease and new pectins that could be specifically targeted to fight cancers in humans. (It has also been demonstrated that pectin lowers serum cholesterol levels.) While not the...

CU, USDA team to curb two invasive, poisonous vines

...n mycorrhizal fungi," said DiTommaso. Through the altered soil, or possibly because of chemicals directly released by the swallow-worts, other plant species have a hard time establishing themselves wherever swallow-worts grow, DiTommaso said. The pink-flowered pale swallow-wort grows rapidly in both forest...

MIT: Oceans are a major gene swap-meet for plankton

...obes manage to exploit changing conditions such as altered light, temperature and nutrients. The work will be reported in two articles in the March 24 issue of Science. As a result of the new findings, "we are beginning to get a picture of gene diversity and gene flow in the most abundant photosynthetic c...

Tastier tomatoes in the future?

...d vitamins, on the other hand the fruits showed an altered combination of various sugars and organic acids," Fernie says. These contents have a great influence on the taste of tomatoes. The scientists used molecular biological methods to identify parts of the tomato genomes responsible for biochemical chang...

Boosting newborns' immune responses

... adenosine, providing an explanation for newborns' altered immune response: adenosine alters the physiology of white cells to suppress production of TNF-alpha (but not of IL-6) when TLRs are stimulated. When Levy's team used antagonists to inhibit adenosine's activity, newborns' white blood cells produced n...

Scientists discover interplay between genes and viruses in tiny ocean plankton

... how microbes exploit changing conditions, such as altered light, temperature and nutrients. "These results tell us that even the smallest organisms show genetic variation related to the environment in which they exist," said Philip Taylor, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s biological ocea...

Pitt professor's theory of evolution gets boost from cell research

...nmental upheaval causes genes to mutate, and those altered genes remain in a recessive state, spreading silently through the population until offspring appear with two copies of the new mutation and change suddenly, seemingly appearing out of thin air. Those changes may be significant and beneficial (like te...

Intelligently designed molecular evolution

... that the functions of promiscuous proteins can be altered with just a small number of amino acid substitutions, a property known as plasticity," said Keasling. "It was our contention that the application of the theory of divergent molecular evolution to promiscuous enzymes would enable us to design enzymes...

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