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Tag: "defenses" at biology news

Ancient retrovirus sheds light on modern pandemic

...co-author Malik, "if we want to understand why our defenses are the way they are, the answers inevitably lie in these ancient viruses more so than the ones that have affected us only recently, such as HIV."...

New vaccine prevents CMV infection and disease in mice

...d we hope to have found an ‘Achilles’ heel’ in the defenses that the virus uses to evade the immune system,” said Spector. “The virus has evolved to persist in the host by evading the immune responses either by hiding or by misdirecting the host’s immune responses. We found a way to teach the host immune sy...

'Insulator' helps silence genes in dormant herpes virus

...ut in nearby nerve cells where the victim's immune defenses cannot reach it, causing no symptoms at all. In order to escape detection by the body's immune system, the latent virus works to silence genes that would cause it to replicate. In this dormant state, only a tiny fragment of the virus genome ?a singl...

Anthrax paralyzes immune cells with lethal toxin, UF research shows

...w the inhaled form of anthrax paralyzes the body's defenses and prevents immune cells from reaching the site of infection. Anthrax killed five people in 2001 when letters containing the bacteria's spores were sent through the mail. The UF findings, published last week in the EMBO Journal, may lead to quicker...

Corals that can fight global warming may one day help fragile reefs

...nt but can also boost their cellular and enzymatic defenses to fight lethal microorganisms as temperatures ris... However, not all corals are able to produce such defenses under thermal stress. "Some corals show unusual resilience to the double threat [of pathogens and wa...

Wheat can fatally starve insect predators

...ducing poisons and stronger walls. Those inducible defenses use a lot of a plant's energy that could be used toward growth and reproduction." The scientists currently are looking for regulatory regions in Hessian fly-susceptible wheat genes that might act as vehicles to carry lectin or a toxin into plants ...

Protein found to shield pancreatic cancer cells from self-destruction

...our themselves, removing one of the body's natural defenses against out-of-control cell growth, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the March issue of Molecular Cancer Research. The protein tissue transglutaminase, known by the abbreviation TG2, previously has been f...

Buckyballs used as 'passkey' into cancer cells

...e peptides were found effective at penetrating the defenses of both liver cancer cells and neuroblastoma cells. "Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial solid tumor in children, and it is responsible for about 15 percent of pediatric cancer deaths," said Jianhua Yang. "Our findings are significant be...

White blood cells of cancer-resistant mice overwhelm natural defenses of cancer cells

...t white blood cells in these mice overwhelm normal defenses of cancer cells. In a report in Cancer Immunity, a journal of the Academy of Cancer Immunology, posted on line today, Zheng Cui, M.D., Ph.D., and Mark C. Willingham, M.D., of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and colleagues said that several...

Science researchers genetically transform immune cells into tumor fighters

...ooking for ways to boost the body's natural immune defenses against cancer, focusing specifically on T cells, a special type of immune cell that can recognize and attack "foreign" cells such as those found in tumors. In their earlier experiments, the researchers removed tumor-fighting T cells from melanoma pa...

Hopkins scientists link immune response to 'ghost' parasites and severely congested sinuses

...d asthma result from genes that control the body's defenses against parasites, but these genes are dormant in healthy people. However, when turned on by so-called ghost parasites, the potent inflammatory response is medically very difficult to control. Researchers say that although chitin, a rigid chemical...

Evolution and the workaround

...hogens and cancer cells mutate to evade the body’s defenses and resist treatment with drugs. The Stowers researchers used the benign budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as their model organism and deleted a key cell division gene called MYO1. Surely, eliminating this important gene would shut down ce...

Worms produce surprise insight into human fever

...sic pathways that set off the worm’s innate immune defenses have homologs—similar proteins in mammal cells, including ours. These conserved pathways are involved in many similar “effector?strategies against hostile bugs peristalsis, low gut pH, lytic enzymes, and antimicrobial peptides to prevent microbial...

Does natural selection drive the evolution of cancer?

...tor hunting prey, and the tumor cells that develop defenses against the predation are the ones that survive and reproduce. An example of parasitism in the tumor environment can be seen in angiogenesis, in which a subset of tumor cells send chemical signals to stimulate the host to generate new blood vesse...

Innovative movies show real-time immune-cell activity within tumors

...Insights from this new view of the body's on-board defenses against cancer may open the way for improved immunotherapies to treat the disease. With a series of movies made under different experimental conditions, the researchers resolved important questions about the mechanisms by which T cells act against ...

Study shows how herpes infects cornea, evades immune cells

...that herpes may be able to evade the immune system defenses in the same way," he said. "Understanding herpes' unusual pathway for infecting the stroma cells opens up new strategies for developing therapies against this potentially blinding disease and has implications for understanding other herpes virus inf...

Molecular 'on/off switch' controls immune defenses against viruses

...witch, the hepatitis C virus turns on human immune defenses upon entering the body but also turns off those defenses by manipulating interaction of key cellular proteins, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers hav...

Study defines effective microbicide design for HIV/AIDS prevention

...e microbicide layer, as well as the body's natural defenses against HIV, more time to work. If left untreated, HIV attacks a person's immune system and can progress to AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The HIV pandemic continues to overwhelm current preventative measures as an estimated 12,000 peo...

UCLA researchers develop T-cells from human embryonic stem cells

...ically targets. T-cells are one of the body's main defenses against disease. The results mark the first time that scientists have been able to derive T-cells out of human embryonic stem cells, said Zoran Galic, assistant research biologist, and lead researcher on the study. "This tells you that you may be a...

Pitt phage hunter takes on tuberculosis

...dications that similarly break down the bacteria's defenses and thereby increase the effectiveness of antibiotics. "We'd like to have an understanding of M. tuberculosis and what happens during an infection that leads to such difficult, prolonged treatment," said Hatfull, who also codirects the Pittsburgh ...

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