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Tag: "mutant" at biology news

Using nature's most primitive anti-viral defense system to find new approaches to cancer research

...an use it to silence the function of any normal or mutant gene at will. This new technology has the potential to change forever the way researchers and doctors fight cancer and other diseases. "By combining the benefits of Drosophila RNAi screens with the functional analysis in human cell culture models o...

From a lowly yeast, researchers divine a clue to human disease

...Sen1 that does not see the stop signal. "The Sen1 mutant reads right through the stop sign and keeps going," Brow says. Without a properly functional Sen1, RNA polymerase II "reads through" the end of the gene and builds longer and longer RNA messages. "In some cases it doesn't have a big effect," Brow ...

Study illuminates how the plague bacteria causes disease

...s ability to disrupt the cytoskeleton. Moreover, a mutant strain of Y. pseudotuberculosis that lacked the GDI activity caused significantly fewer problems for infected mice compared to normal bacteria. "Earlier studies that focused only on the protein's kinase activity had missed half the picture," Stebbin...

Clue found to Epstein-Barr virus' ability to form and sustain tumors

... infected human B cells with EBVs carrying various mutant EBNA-1s. The analysis showed that one 25-amino acid segment within EBNA-1 was responsible for the regulation of viral gene transcription, the first step in the process by which a gene's coded information is converted first into RNA and then into pr...

Fruit fly study identifies gene mutation that regulates sensitivity to alcohol

...ive effects. By breeding subsequent populations of mutant flies, the scientists identified the particular genetic mutation. The researchers further showed that the white rabbit mutation disrupted the function of the RhoGAP18B gene. They also isolated a number of gene variants of RhoGAP18B, each of which...

New clues to how sex evolves

...ving only one X chromosome. The observation that a mutant him 8 gene gives rise to a high incidence of males is what gave the gene its name. "In all organisms, sex chromosomes do special things," says Dernburg. "For example, in species where an X and Y chromosome make a male, only very small regions of ...

Plant studies reveal how, where seeds store iron

...l Science. The researchers combined traditional mutant analysis (turning on and off the VIT1 protein) with a powerful X-ray imaging technique to create a map of where iron is localized in the seed. Guerinot was surprised by the finding because most studies on iron storage focus on another protein called ...

With fruit fly sex, researchers find mind-body connection

...hysical features of both sexes. As a result, these mutant females are not recognized by normal males and these mutant males are not recognized by normal females ?and none of the mutants can mate. So this makes it diffi...

Mutant gene causes severe kidney disease in infants

...phospholipase C epsilon or PLCE1. Identifying the mutant gene is important to scientists because PLCE1 affects the development of podocytes ?specialized cells that play a vital role in the kidney's ability to remove waste products from blood, while retaining important blood proteins. To parents of infa...

Novel experiment documents evolution of genome in near-real time

...faster growth, the researchers substituted the two mutant genes into the original strain and duplicated the faster growth rate. "We expected to find many mutated genes and we thought our results would be very difficult to understand, but neither was the case," said Christopher D. Herring, a co-author of the...

Plant studies reveal how, where seeds store iron

...l Science. The researchers combined traditional mutant analysis (turning on and off the VIT1 protein) with a powerful X-ray imaging technique to create a map of where iron is localized in the seed. Guerinot was surprised by the finding because most studies on iron storage focus on another protein called ...

Virginia Tech's System X supercomputer provides super tool for simulation of cell division

...perimental data consists of observed traits of 130 mutant yeast strains constructed by disabling and/or over-expressing the genes that encode the proteins of the regulatory network. The model has 143 parameters that need to be estimated from the data. "That is a big problem," said Watson. "You can't do that...

Widely used hepatitis B drug spurs HIV drug resistance

...can be tailored to probe effects on any particular mutant of HIV. Lab results showed that entecavir, in concentrations less than a tenth of what is used in humans, cut the number of newly infected cells in half. However, at increasing concentrations, the drug had no greater impact on suppressing HIV r...

Vaccine to cope with viral diversity in HIV

...gh frequency viral strains as well as against most mutant forms of the virus. ...

Anti-dandruff compound may help fight epilepsy

...athing cells with small amounts of ZnPy caused the mutant potassium channels to let three times as much potassium flow through, raising the possibility of restoring normal nerve cell activity. “Most drug discoveries uncover chemicals that stop things from working - it’s a lot easier to close or block a ...

MIT biologists solve vitamin puzzle

... Walker resulted in a novel method for identifying mutant strains of a soil microbe that could not form a sy...lant. Walker's team has now found that one such mutant has a defective form of an enzyme known as BluB that leaves it unable to synthesize B12. BluB cat...

Inhibiting blood to save the brain

... cells and binds to fibrinogen. Mice expressing a mutant form of fibrinogen that failed to bind Mac-1 had fewer inflammatory lesions and less severe MS symptoms. Blocking the interaction between Mac-1 and fibrinogen after the first episode of paralysis using the fibrin peptide prevented subsequent relapse...

Scientists identify a gene that may suppress colorectal cancer

...mice. Interestingly, the results suggest that the mutant Atp5a1 gene caused the death of tumor cells, pri... when it was present on the same chromosome as the mutant Apc gene. ...

Cancer researchers add spice to research against rare neuromuscular disease

...n known as Kennedy's disease, which is caused by a mutant gene. Currently there is no treatment for the inhe...rogression of the disease in mice that carried the mutant human gene that causes the disease. The mice were able to walk much more normally, their muscles wer...

Penn study on lung-infecting bacterial enzyme suggests new approach to cystic fibrosis treatment

...rough not only the normal, but also the CF-causing mutant CFTR. The next step for the research team is to develop specific inhibitors against the bacterial SMase and test the idea in an animal model. ...

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