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Tag: "plays" at biology news

Prenatal Stress Keeps Infants, Toddlers up at Night, Study Says

...ighly regarded indexes of healthy development, and plays a critical role in consolidating memory and facilitating learning, regulating metabolism and appetite, promoting good moods and sustaining both cardiovascular health and a vigorous immune function. Weve long known that a childs sleep is vital to h...

Carnegie Mellon scientists find key HIV protein makes cell membranes bend more easily

...ll-like structures called liposomes. FP-23 likely plays several roles in viral fusion, according to the re.... But the Carnegie Mellon work suggests that FP-23 plays another, equally important function — reducing the free energy of curved fusion intermediates. These...

Genomic Analysis Uncovers New Targets for HIV Vaccine

...ng the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, which plays a major role in the immune system by identifying foreign invaders and "tagging" them for destruction. Two of the HLA genes, known as HLA-A and B, are turned off by HIV when it enters the body, which keeps the immune system from recognizing the virus...

Nicotine rush hinges on sugar in neurons

...pporting the theory that the buried water molecule plays a functional role. Chen called the group’s Nature Neuroscience study “one of the few times that you felt that you connected the dots.” The study also represents a tour de force of protein crystallography. Homologs of nAChR had been studied at the...

Brain inflammation may be friend, not foe, for Alzheimer's patients

...here is a great deal of evidence that inflammation plays a potentially negative role in Alzheimer’s disease,” said O’Banion. “But much of the evidence comes from experiments with cells in a dish or postmortem human tissue, not from living organisms in which disease progression is closely monitored. “Peo...

The insect vector always bites twice

...e vector saliva, which is adapted for blood feeds, plays a prime role in the transmission of the associated diseases. It contains numerous proteins, including immunogenic ones that can modulate or induce a human immune response. Working for the EpiVect programme initiated in 2003 (1), scientists from IRD r...

A new plant-bacterial symbiotic mechanism promising for crop applications

...lved in producing the unknown signal molecule that plays the role of Nod factor, prompted the team’s hypothesis that a molecule similar to a plant hormone (4), cytokinin, could act in the mechanisms by triggering nodulation. The discovery of the nature of the signal molecule itself, which remains to be ful...

Envisat captures first image of Sargassum from space

...s. The amount of chlorophyll present in vegetation plays an important role in determining how healthy it is. Accurately monitoring chlorophyll from space, therefore, provides a valuable tool for modelling primary productivity. "The 709 band used by MERIS is not present on other ocean-colour sensors. It...

Salty oceans provide early warning for climate change

...ng of the waters is linked to sluggish flow. “Salt plays a far more important role that we first thought,” says Professor Rainer Zahn, a palaeoclimatologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. Salt increases the density of water. Once a pocket of water becomes salty enough it sinks, draw...

Researchers shed light on mechanism of action used by anti-cancer drug

...in the ER. The ER is a subcellular structure which plays a key role in cellular protein disposition. When stressed in this way, the cell responds to the protein load by reducing protein synthesis, increasing levels of protein chaperones, and by accelerating protein degradation. However, according to Grant,...

Marine phytoplankton changes form to protect itself from different predators

...phytoplankton. A tiny single-celled organism that plays a key role in the carbon cycle of cold-water oceans may be a lot smarter than scientists had suspected. In a paper published June 11 in the online version of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report the first evidence that...

Potent possibilities for parasite attack

...sease develops after infection and the host genome plays a major role in clinical outcome." The results picked up another surprising finding: the team could assign a function to only one-third of the 200 genes restricted to one or two of the species. "The genome sequences have given us a short-cut t...

Gene responsible for common hearing loss identified for first time

...tic indications of involvement in otosclerosis: it plays a role during embryonic development of the ear and is expressed in otosclerotic bone. They used SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) analysis, or looking at DNA sequence variations occurring in a single nucleotide, A, T, C or G, to study a large pat...

Revealed -- Mosquito genes that could be controlling the spread of killer viruses

...to is of great importance as scientists believe it plays a key role in controlling the transmission of viruses that cause yellow and dengue fevers – diseases that infect over 50 million people worldwide every year. This study is the first of its kind on the newly-sequenced genome of the Aedes aegypti m...

How plague-causing bacteria disarm host defense

...g important." The researchers speculate that YpkA plays an important role in disabling the body's immune system beyond its previously known role of disrupting the host cell's normal structure, which interferes with the cell's innate ability to engulf and destroy invading bacteria. "The question now becom...

Experimental gene therapy 'abolishes' arthritis pain and lessens joint damage

...tis may export inflammation to the brain, where it plays a role in neurological conditions (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and multiple sclerosis). While the just published study involved a technique that delivers gene therapy by injection at the joint, other promising approaches may involve inter...

Cytomegalovirus exacerbates atherosclerosis through an autoimmune mechanism

...ge and support the hypothesis that virus infection plays a crucial role in mediating the atherosclerotic process. Moreover, these findings contribute to the design of novel preventive and therapeutic strategies....

How brain pacemakers erase diseased messages

...ower setting. The intensity of stimulation also plays an important role, the study suggests, by determining the number of brain cells affected by a particular series of pulses. A better understanding of the processes underlying deep brain stimulation could enable physicians to better fine-tune electr...

Salk scientists hammer out a pathway that promotes muscle cell survival in mice

...cine, is the first to explore the part this enzyme plays in a cascade of events triggered by exercise-induc...n, CREB and HDAC, and have shown that this pathway plays a major role in maintaining normal muscle function," said Berdeaux. "Now it remains to be seen how t...

Protein enables discovery of quantum effect in photosynthesis

...y long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis," said Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. "This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to si...

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