Mutation improves memory, may lead to memory-enhancing pill
...ble to find the platform significantly faster than normal mice could, they reported. "For example, if a p...ay." The mutant mice also performed better than normal mice in a "fear-conditioning" test. In that test, animals are put into a cage followed by a mild foo...Major gene study uncovers secrets of leukemia
...ocytes, instead multiply rapidly and overwhelm the normal blood cells the body needs to survive. The St....olving genes that function as master regulators of normal B-cell development and differentiation. A report on this work appears in the March 7 online edit...Need oxygen? Cells know how to spend and save
...e energy without excess free radical production at normal oxygen levels. Semenza's team noticed that on...s in two different forms, COX4-1 and COX4-2. Under normal oxygen conditions, the cells' mitochondria contain mostly COX4-1. The researchers suspected that COX...New compound prevents alcoholic behavior, relapse in animals by blocking stress response
...that are not dependent, this activation returns to normal within a day or so. The new study shows that the CRF system becomes overactive in the long term in animals with a history of alcohol dependence, increasing the risk for relapse. Heilig and his team showed that MTIP blocked the activity of CRF in ...Researchers identify ovarian cancer biomarkers
...blood vessel cells from 21 ovarian tumors and four normal ovarian tissue samples. From there, they were able...vessels of cancer tissue but not in the vessels of normal tissues. The researchers went on to study in detail 12 markers that had not previously been linked ...New player in commitment to life as a fat cell
...50% reduction in fat tissue mass compared to their normal littermates. Genetically obese mice exhibited increased XOR activity and urate in the adipose tissue. Urate is a salt derived from uric acid. "Our results identify XOR as a potential therapeutic target for metabolic abnormalities beyond hyperurice...MIT model helps researchers 'see' brain development
...ients with autism. “We now have some idea of what normal development looks like. The next step is to see if we can detect abnormal development in diseases like autism by looking at folding differences,?said Fischl. This tool may also be used to shed light on other neurological diseases such as schizophreni...RNA splicing factor implicated in ovarian tumor cell growth
...n, or PTB, and another splicing factor compared to normal matching ovarian tissues," said William Beck, professor and head of biopharmaceutical sciences. In the new study, Beck and research assistant professor Xiaolong He show that knocking down PTB expression with small, interfering RNA "substantially i...'Marathon mice' elucidate little-known muscle type
... able to run farther and at higher work loads than normal mice could. The findings could ultimately lead to...dy, the researchers produced mice with higher than normal levels of the transcriptional coactivator PGC-1â in their skeletal muscles. Transcriptional coactiva...How appetite-stimulating brain cells work overtime during fasting
...mulates thyroid hormone's production ate less than normal after a period of food deprivation. "This shows the key importance of UCP in the brain and its effect on neuronal activity," Diano said. "It's how neurons 'learn' that food is missing, and it keeps them ready to eat when food is introduced." T...Scientists learn the origin of rogue B cells
...receptor, like one might edit a paper, he says. In normal circumstances, this new, good receptor replaces the bad one, but what Casellas and Dr. Patrick C. Wilson of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation found was that about 10 percent of the body's B cells retain both receptors: a good, useful one and t...Imaging techniques permit scientists to follow a day -- or four -- in the life of a cell
\The movement and growth of cells are critical for normal physiological processes, and--when perturbed--can result in negative outcomes such as tumor formation. Understanding how live cells function is therefore invaluable for molecular and cellular biologists, and advanced techniques to visualize cells in ...Hybrid molecule causes cancer cells to self-destruct
...rs believe the partners help enzymes to resume the normal assembly of sugar molecules and correct aberrant gene expression patterns, two processes that go awry when cancer occurs. Now that they've identified the butyrate-ManNAc molecule as a potential cancer fighter, the Johns Hopkins team members are ex...Gene variations contribute to aggression and anger in women
...elated women of European descent. In order to find normal variations in genes and behavior, the women were not prescreened for behavioral type. Researchers found that those who had one or both of two alterations in the promoter region of the serotonin receptor 2C gene were more likely to score lower on two ...3 proteins may play important role in nerve-cell repair
... three times longer than those on nerve cells with normal levels of the proteins, and the extensions grew four to eight times faster than in control cells. "Our findings suggest that these three proteins could be important targets for treating stroke, brain and spinal cord injuries and also neurodegener...Cocoa 'vitamin' health benefits could outshine penicillin
...criteria. Vitamins are defined as essential to the normal functioning, metabolism, regulation and growth of cells and deficiency is usually linked to disease. At the moment, the science does not support epicatechin having an essential role. But, Fabricant, who is vice president scientific affairs at the Nat...Anti-wrinkle compound causes pathological reaction in skin cells
... a concentration similar to the one resulting from normal use of an antiwrinkle cream. The thickening of the skin induced by the pathological swelling of the fibroblasts would explain the antiwrinkle effect of DMAE, according to the researchers. "Even though DMAE is similar to medication, there is very l...A new study of living cells could revolutionize the way we test drugs
...rganisms in the environment. To detect a cell’s normal activity, Andre Geim and fellow researchers modifi... reduced the sensitivity of the technique, and the normal activity of the yeast cell could not be detected. This is the first time such a technique has been u...Renegade RNA -- Clues to cancer and normal growth
...ce. MicroRNAs, already implicated in cancer and normal development, latch on to and gum up larger strands...icroRNAs have been implicated in cancer as well as normal development, Mendell hopes that further study of miR-29b will reveal other, hidden functions of micr...Gene elevating breast cancer risk also causes prostate cancer
...tor, PALB2 that regulates certain key functions of normal BRCA2 activity. The next step was to set out to evaluate the newly detected PALB2 gene as a potential heritable breast cancer susceptibility candidate by screening for disease-related alterations. The results of this international research effort wer...