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Tag: "crucial" at biology news

Scientists re-grow dental enamel from cultured cells

...yer cells are known as the 3T3-J2 cell line). This crucial step boosts the number of dental epithelial cells available for enamel production. In the study being reported today, the researchers seeded the cultured dental epithelial cells onto collagen sponge scaffolds, along with cells from the middle of the ...

Meeting the ethanol challenge: Scientists use supercomputer to target cellulose bottleneck

...ese results are important because they can provide crucial guidance as scientists formulate selective experim...nd of the cellulose chain. This gives the enzyme a crucial foothold to begin the process of digesting or "unzipping" the cellulose into sugar molecules. To...

Brown team finds crucial protein role in deadly prion spread

...ease. But scientists believe that there is another crucial step in this propagation process ?fragmentation of existing prion complexes. Once converted, the thinking goes, clusters of "bad" or infectious protein are smashed into smaller bits, a process that creates "seeds" so that prions multiply more quickly...

Fish can determine their social rank by observation alone, study finds

...s wrote. "Success in aggressive bouts is therefore crucial to male reproductive fitness, and the ability to infer the relative strength of rivals before engaging them in potentially costly fights should be highly adaptive." When A. burtoni males fight, it's easy to spot the winner. Mature males have a men...

Williams College biologist explores photosynthetic apparatus

... proteins associated with the biological apparatus crucial to photosynthesis and proteins that are critical in the acclimation response to specific environmental stresses." Ting's goal is to determine how genomic differences become advantages in the capacity for photosynthesis of cyanobacteria under certa...

The influence of the menstrual cycle on the female brain

...gion of the brain) and their projection sites2, is crucial for neural coding of rewards. Its dysfunction can result in disorders such as addictions and is also implicated in various psychiatric and neurological pathologies, such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenic disorders. Many studies on animals prov...

Fruit fly gene research may shed light on human disease processes

...hromosome-counting process and in regulating other crucial cell activities. "This signaling process is not unique to embryonic sex differentiation, but occurs in hundreds of genes throughout the body, in flies and in higher animals, too," Avila says. "Our work sheds light on signal transmission in humans...

A first glimpse of the influenza replication machine

...n the cells of an infected host. The polymerase is crucial in this process because it copies the viral genome and directs the production of its proteins. Interfering with polymerase function would prevent the virus replicating, thereby reducing the spread of the virus and the severity of the infection. "...

When smell cells fail they call in stem cell reserves

... all the repair work. “The ability to smell is crucial for eating, mating and survival, and it’s important that the olfactory system be fully operational all the time,?explains Reed. “The HBCs act as a fail-safe to ensure continued function of the sense of smell.? The discovery of these two distinct t...

Biologists call for better choice of model organisms in 'evo-devo'

...udy. One of the selection criteria deemed most crucial is the phylogenetic position of prospective model organisms, which reflects their evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic position is employed in two common, but problematic, ways, either as a guide to plug holes in unexplored regions of the phy...

Dig deeper to find Martian life

...better than underground in icy rock. This could be crucial for the scientists and engineers planning future Mars missions to find life."...

A potential biological cause for sudden infant death syndrome

...trol of vital functions may be impaired during the crucial first six months of life. "We think that the control systems for vital or homeostatic functions reach full maturity only towards the end of the first year of life," Kinney says. The researchers note that despite the national Back to Sleep cam...

Gene key to taste bud development identified

...they receive. "Not only did we find that SOX2 is crucial for the development of taste buds, but we showed t...s controlled. The SOX2 gene is already known to be crucial in controlling whether embryonic stem cells remain undifferentiated and whether stem cells in the br...

Cracking the egg

...velopment is a very stable process and many of the crucial steps associated with it have remained the same along the vertebrate evolutionary pathway. But at the same time there's evidence of instability in other areas. According to Dr. Evsikov, "There's tantalizing evidence for rapid change in a few critic...

Two nerve cells in direct contact

...ver the question remained: which of the two is the crucial one? The Max Planck scientists therefore blocked the two possible routes selectively with laser ablation (the cell is filled with fluorescent dye which has a toxic effect when strongly stimulated) and tested sensitivity to rotation in the H2 cell. ...

New brain-chemistry differences found in depressed women

...nd healthy women in a brain-chemical system that's crucial to stress and emotions. The study adds further e...ts' responses to various depression treatments, is crucial to the continued improvement in the understanding of depression and the development of better treatm...

Comprehensive model is first to map protein folding at atomic level

...tail." Fiendishly intricate, protein folding is crucial to the chemistry of life. Each of the body's 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, is attracted or repulsed by water; it's largely these affinities that drive the contorting of proteins into distinctive three-dimensional shapes within the ...

Cities change the songs of birds

...ch “environmental shaping?could potentially play a crucial role in the process of speciation, although it is not at all clear whether urban and forest populations of great tits are on such a path. Conservation Implications: Adjust or Leave Speciation takes place over long, evolutionary time scales, ...

A valuable fly for research into disease

...he function of genes whose human homologues play a crucial role in many diseases, including neurological, metabolic and developmental disorders, cancer, cardiovascular failure, and pathologies of the visual, auditory and immune systems. A growing number of laboratories are modelling human diseases in the fl...

An AIDS-related virus tricks cells to become tumors, new Penn study finds

...he last four to five years and this study provides crucial step in understanding the mechanism for anti-tumorigenic activity against KSHV-associated human cancers," concludes Robertson. "Additionally, we can now use compounds known to inhibit proteosome activity to determine their effectiveness in inhibiting...

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