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Tag: "broken" at biology news

Brittle prions are more infectious

...ggregates. By preventing the aggregates from being broken up to smaller seeds, their propagation can be reduced. In contrast, most such strategies now aim at preventing the proteins from forming in the first place," he said. In future studies, Weissman and his colleagues plan to expand their analytical mod...

Synthetic molecule causes cancer cells to self-destruct

...journal Nature Chemical Biology. "By bypassing the broken pathway, we can use the cells' own machinery to destroy themselves." To find the compound, called procaspase activating compound one (PAC-1), Hergenrother, with colleagues at the U. of I., Seoul National University, and the National Center for Toxic...

UT Southwestern researchers find gene mutation that leads to 'broken hearts'

...pathway for synthesis of a small lipid caused this broken heart defect in fruit flies. One of these enzymes, HMG CoA reductase, also plays a key role in the synthesis of cholesterol in humans. In fruit flies, these enzymes are required to generate a small lipid to modify a signaling protein, which is requir...

Blood test predicts success of quitting smoking using the nicotine patch

...Research Center. When nicotine is metabolized ?or broken down in the body ?it turns to cotinine. Cotinine is then metabolized to 3-hydroxycotinine (3-HC) by an enzyme in the liver. This study measured the ratio of these two breakdown products of nicotine among 480 smokers. A high ratio meant rapid metaboli...

Genetic snooze button governs timing of spring flowers

...t grow in temperate climates. "Bud dormancy is not broken until the plant has 'counted' a sufficient number of days of cold to ensure that any subsequent warm weather actually indicates that spring has arrived," Amasino says. The Wisconsin team led by Amasino has worked out much of the process of vernaliza...

UNH researcher restoring oyster reefs to Great Bay

...gical physician." Just as an orthopedist can set a broken bone but the body must do the healing, he can set up conditions that are right for oyster reefs to prosper, but factors beyond his control ?water quality, larval abundances, and other conditions he's exploring ?play a major role in his success. At f...

Gene linked to rare disease activates fat breakdown

...ctivator offers a new picture of how stored fat is broken down in adipose and other tissues." The finding solves a puzzle first raised in 2001 with the discovery that CGI-58 caused the lipid storage disease CDS in some patients, Zechner said. The symptoms characteristic of the disorder coupled with the str...

Light-sensitive photoswitches could restore sight to those with macular degeneration

...channel, by attaching the azobenzene compound to a broken potassium channel, which is a valve found in nerve cells. When attached, one end of the compound sticks in the channel pore and blocks it like a drain plug. When hit with UV light, the molecule kinks and pulls the plug, allowing ions to flow through ...

Combination therapy shows promising results in patients with advanced lung cancer

...mbined with Celebrex. Because they target what is broken in a cancer cell and leave the healthy cells alone, therapies like Tarceva cause fewer side effects than conventional therapies such as chemotherapy, which targets all fast growing cells and often results in debilitating side effects. Reckamp charact...

Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity

...ced. The carbon from the dead rainforest trees is broken down by microbes and fungi to become carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. “Fragmentation is affecting the forest in a lot of ways,?said Laurance. “These changes occur remarkably fast, and when you completely alter something as bas...

Radiologists attempt to solve mystery of Tut's demise

...vered Tut's tomb in 1922. "We believe that this broken piece from the first vertebra of the king's spine may have been fractured and dislodged when Carter, Derry, Hamdy and their team tried to remove and free the gold mask, which was tightly glued and quite adherent to the body, by using some metal instr...

Age-related changes in DNA repair illuminate the connection between age and genetic damage

.... Cells possess a variety of methods for repairing broken DNA, and the cell's "choice" of how to repair a particular break can be critical. Some repair methods are simple but error prone, whereas the more accurate methods have elaborate molecular requirements and are probably much slower. The new result...

Three-dimensional, miniature endoscope opens new diagnostic possibilities

...through a probe about the size of a human hair ?is broken into its component colors and projected onto tissue, with each color illuminating a different part of the tissue surface. The light reflected back is recorded, and the intensity of the various colors decoded by a spectrometer, which analyzes the wav...

Brains can recover from alcoholic damage but patients should stop drinking as soon as possible

...ine provides hints at how cell membranes are being broken down and repaired. In addition, the neuropsychological performance of the patients was tested at the beginning and end of the study, using a specific test (the d2-test) that primarily measures attention and concentration [2]. Dr Bartsch said: "...

Pesticides need sunscreen to beat the heat

...t Office announcing that several heat records were broken in the UK this year. The team of scientists, led by Dr Li-Xiong Wen, has developed a new type of capsule that shields pesticides from UV light. The research, to be published on Monday in Pest Management Science (DOI 10.1002/ps.1301) shows that the p...

The first tree genome is published: Poplar holds promise as renewable bioenergy resource

...erials on earth, which by enzymatic action, can be broken down into sugars that in turn can be fermented into alcohol and distilled to yield fuel-quality ethanol and other liquid fuels. Poplar is the most complex genome to be sequenced and assembled by a single public sequencing facility and only the thi...

New engineered drug may offer prolonged arthritis relief

...equired for half the quantity of the protein to be broken down and eliminated from the joint space. "At 12 hours, the soluble protein was already at a concentration in the joint below 10 percent of the injected dose," Setton said. In contrast, the sticky ELP took about two weeks to fall to the 10 percen...

Sandia researchers discover way to see how a drug attaches to a cell

...he shape of the liposome. When the liposomes are broken up, the platinum spheres remain intact. The thickness of the platinum shell around the sphere can be controlled by reducing or increasing the amount of the platinum salt placed into the solution. Shelnutt sees many potential applications for this...

MIT material stops bleeding in seconds

...eeding. Once the injury heals, the nontoxic gel is broken down into molecules that cells can use as building blocks for tissue repair. "We have found a way to stop bleeding, in less than 15 seconds, that could revolutionize bleeding control," said Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in the MIT Depar...

Engineered yeast speeds ethanol production

...First, cornstarch or another polymer of glucose is broken down into single sugar (glucose) molecules by enzymes, then yeast ferments the glucose into ethanol and carbon dioxide. Last year, four billion gallons of ethanol were produced from 1.43 billion bushels of corn grain (including kernels, stalks, le...

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