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Tag: "mutant" at biology news

When nerve cells can't make contact

... mice, not in humans. "We had even already created mutant mice which, in functional terms, were carrying the... the nervous system breaks down completely and the mutant animals die immediately after birth. However, their nerve cells can be examined in detail. According...

How does a zebrafish grow a new tail?

...n, and inhibits fin regeneration. Fish that have a mutant Wnt5b protein regenerate missing tails very quickly. Too much of another related protein, Wnt8, also increases cell proliferation in the regenerating fin. "We can actually increase the rate of regeneration by turning on these genes," Moon said. T...

Jefferson scientists find aging gene also protects against prostate cancer development

...en receptor mutation,?Dr. Pestell explains. “These mutant receptors are resistant to current therapies and are all blocked by expression of SIRT1,?adding that prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels were used to confirm this. Rising PSA levels are frequently an indication of prostate cancer growth or recurre...

Zinc plays important role in brain circuitry

...g among the neurons. Significantly, they found the mutant mouse shows the same exaggerated response to noise...riments, the researchers produced mice harboring a mutant form of a gene for a receptor for zinc in neurons--thereby compromising the neurons' ability to resp...

Parkinson's mutation stunts neurons

... pinpointed the malfunction of the protein made by mutant forms of the gene called LRRK2 and how it affects ... their experiments, when the researchers generated mutant forms of the enzyme, they discovered that the mutants showed higher-than-normal enzymatic kinase act...

Fruit fly aggression studies have relevance to humans, animals

... in the microarray experiment. Fifteen of those 19 mutant families did, in fact, display abnormal aggression compared to non-mutants, confirming the role of those specific genes in aggressive behavior. Those genes were already known to affect nervous system development, metabolism and immunity, among other...

A wolf in sheep's clothing: Plague bacteria reveal one of their virulence tricks

...aked havoc on their host cells' cytoskeletons, the mutant left the actin-based skeleton intact. Then, the r...earchers then injected mice with the wild-type and mutant strains of Yersinia. All the mice infected with the wild-type bacteria died within nine days of expo...

Critical hearing gene helps send auditory messages to brain

..., they reported. The sensory structures within the mutant animals' ears otherwise appeared to develop normally. "Study of the genes responsible for deafness can bring new insight into the molecular basis of how hearing works," said Christine Petit of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. The sensory ma...

Psst! Coffee drinkers: Fruit flies have something to tell you about caffeine

...Johns Hopkins researchers began by testing whether mutant fruit flies prefer eating sugar over sugar laced w... Sciences at Hopkins. "The bottom line is that our mutant flies willingly drink caffeine-laced liquids and foods because they can't taste its bitterness -- th...

Cellular traffic backups implicated in skeletal malformations

...rove fatal just hours after fertilization. But the mutant fish, named crusher, hatched and survived to nine ...ues found no extracellular type II collagen in the mutant tissue. Instead, the protein was either stuck within a bloated ER or associated with the proteasome,...

Fighting like a girl or boy determined by gene in fruit flies

...s and was staging contests between another line of mutant fruitless flies without such clear brain-switching genetics. So Austrian postdoctoral fellow Eleftheria Vrontou, the lead author, packed up their flies and took them to the Boston fruit fly fight club. For the past five years, researchers in Krav...

Researchers create genetically matched embryonic stem cells for transplantation

... of their genome that contain duplicated copies of mutant genes that have been linked with malignancies or abnormal tissue growth. "Right now this technique is useful for basic research, but we are hopeful that parthenogenetic cells might prove useful for therapies," Daley says. "Our cells produce normal ...

Does natural selection drive the evolution of cancer?

...mor cells, you're quite likely to have a resistant mutant somewhere in that population of billions or even t..., can be seen within a tumor-cell population. When mutant tumor cells divide to replicate, the daughter cells share the same mutations. The final conditio...

Mutant mouse provides insights into breast cancer

By discovering a mutant mouse that is highly susceptible to mammary tumors...y testing hundreds of mice pedigrees, they found a mutant line of mice called Chaos3 that had a 20-fold increase in a hallmark for cancer called genomic insta...

First biomarker for human sleepiness identified in fruit flies

...ncurring sleep debt. When scientists kept the same mutant flies awake for extended nine or 12 hour stretches that normally cause them to incur sleep debt, their amylase levels increased. "This helped prove that the increases in amylase activity level we were seeing weren't just triggered by wakefulness,"...

Distinguishing friend from foe in the battle against cancer

...cancer chemotherapeutic drugs specifically targets mutant enzymes or "oncoproteins" that have run amok and n... that stifles inappropriate growth signals sent by mutant proteins in cancer cells. STIs may look like overnight successes, but they are actually the result o...

Regulating the nuclear architecture of the cell

...nce." Karpen and Peng studied fruit flies with mutant Su(var)3-9 genes, flies that could not produce HP1...enough, Karpen and Peng found that Drosophila with mutant dcr-2 genes showed multiple nucleoli and other symptoms of heterochromatin deregulation, just as Su(...

Inheritance outside DNA

...ons in a cancer-associated gene called Apc. In the mutant Apc mice, the loss of IGF2 imprinting seems to particularly affect the behavior of the adult stem cells that continually regenerate the colon in mice. This probably plays a role in the increased risk of colon cancer, says Feinberg. Spotting epigen...

HIV gets a makeover

... several generations Hatziioannou created an HIV-1 mutant that could evade the monkey cells' TRIM5 recognition. Another bit of engineering was required to get around the second obstacle: APOBEC proteins produced by a host normally cause invading viruses to mutate so much that they can't survive, but HIV...

Proteins may behave differently in natural environments

...Center in Dallas, found such dynamic behavior in a mutant form of a protein called GroEL, which chaperones o... colleagues followed this procedure with the GroEL mutant with its sister-protein, GroES, they were surprised. Two of the structures were as they expected, bu...

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