Tag: "transgenic" at biology news

Discovery in orange cauliflower may lead to more nutritious crops

...Plant Research at Cornell, is currently working on transgenic potatoes, altering genes to increase both the metabolic sink and beta-carotene synthesis. Orange cauliflower was first discovered in a farmer's white cauliflower field in Canada about 30 years ago and is now available at supermarkets....

Modified mushrooms may yield human drugs

... One application of their technology is the use of transgenic mushrooms as factories for producing therapeutic p...ng to be the platform of the future." To create transgenic mushrooms, researchers attached a gene that confers resistance to hygromycin, an antibiotic, to circ...

Statin treatment improves spatial memory in mouse models of Alzheimer's

...ed improvement of spatial reference memory. The transgenic mice used in the study are homozygous for the gene...n were able to find the platform while none of the transgenic mice receiving only saline were able to do so. Normal mice on statin also showed improvement in the...

Fast and slow -- How the spinal cord controls the speed of movement

...free movement. Fetcho and his group are building a transgenic line of fish with those brain cells labeled so they may be targeted and removed with lasers....

Deconstructing brain wiring, one neuron at a time

...d using slices of brain, it is possible to produce transgenic mice that will express specific genes in a targeted class of neurons, Callaway says. "All neurons of the type we select will then express the avian viral receptor and the rabies virus protein, allowing the modified rabies virus to infect targeted cel...

'Marathon mice' elucidate little-known muscle type

...GC-1â wasn't known. "The muscle from the PGC-1â transgenic mice was strikingly redder in appearance than wild...n IIX MHC. Nearly 100% of muscle fibers in the transgenic animals contained abundant MHC IIX mRNA and protein, they found, as compared to only 15%?0% in norma...

Imaging techniques permit scientists to follow a day -- or four -- in the life of a cell

...imilar to those that are used to create cloned and transgenic organisms, and it can also be applied to more complex assays--including laser photobleaching and fluorescent speckle microscopy--that yield specific insights into cellular processes. A second freely available protocol ( http://www.cshprotocols.org...

Mechanisms involved with tumor relapse identified

...o recognize and eradicate tumor cells. Using a transgenic mouse model of breast cancer, researchers found that interferon gamma, a cytokine or chemical messenger that is produced by cells of the immune system upon activation, plays a role in tumor relapse. In humans, interferon gamma is also produced by whi...

Tumor-suppressor gene is critical for placenta development

...e new paper. For this study, Wenzel developed a transgenic mouse that makes an enzyme that deletes DNA. Speci...s between two gene markers. She then used a second transgenic mouse in which the gene markers were placed in the Rb gene. When she crossed the two strains of m...

Protein overexpression at heart of heart failure

...fic, drug-inducible beta 2a subunit overexpression transgenic mouse which was crossbred with the channel pore overexpressing mouse when still nonfailing (“Adaptive phase?. In the nonfailing double transgenics, the induction of beta 2a protein expression increased the activity of single ventricular L-VDCC, rende...

Why is the heart heart-shaped?

...man, Deborah Yelon, and colleagues found, by using transgenic zebrafish in which they can watch individual cardiac cells, that cells change size and shape, enlarging and elongating to form the bulges in the heart tube and eventually the chambers. Since the heart is beating as it develops, they asked whether car...

Killing the messenger RNA -- But which one?

...ns and cause deafness. Working with a strain of transgenic mice unable to perform RNA editing and normal control mice, the researchers found that a complete lack of the edited version of the microRNA in question had the effect of driving production of the PRPS1 enzyme to about double its normal levels. This,...

MIT: Pulsing light silences overactive neurons

...ring group plans to start studying such devices in transgenic mice this year. The group also plans to use the new method to study neural circuits. Last year, Boyden devised a technique to stimulate neurons by shining blue light on them, so with blue and yellow light the researchers can now exert exquisite co...

Discovery of the first resistance gene to rice yellow mottle virus

...cing resistance to RYMV. The results show that the transgenic plants have only partial resistance, and for only ...ction, the strategy of introducing a viral gene by transgenic techniques does not bring any advantages compared with the use of natural resistance. This researc...

Researchers identify neurons that assign value during learning

...o tackle this question, the researchers engineered transgenic fruit flies that express in distinct nerve cells a special ion channel, "channelrhodopsin-2," whose activity is light-sensitive (the protein is normally found in green algae). As a result of expressing channelrhodopsin-2, neurons could be activated s...

A fisheye view of the deadliest breast cancer

...h suitable for xenografts. More properly, it’s a transgenic zebrafish, a tropical minnow native to streams aro...ebrate, just like us. Being immune suppressed, the transgenic fish allowed Konstantin Stoletov and colleagues at UCSD to insert a xenograft of human MDA breast c...

Spelling out cancer on the nanoscale

...rates from hematopoetic tumor cells in preclinical transgenic mouse models. The nano-fluidic system physically separates the proteins in very small capillary tubes and then uses antibodies for protein detection. It was also tested on human lymphoma samples. In previous work, the Felsher group had shown t...

Worms produce surprise insight into human fever

...d transcription factors. In fluorescently labeled transgenic worms, he mapped gene expression in the two target pathways as they came into direct contact with a small zoo of pathogenic microbes. The big surprise was the discovery that the HSF-1 pathway was required for C. elegans immunity against Pseud...

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

...icroscopy techniques in concert with sophisticated transgenic technologies, scientists at The Wistar Institute h...ents in three dimensions over time of T cells in a transgenic mouse developed by Weninger and Ulrich von Andrian at Harvard Medical School in which the cells fluo...

Most widely used organic pesticide requires help to kill

... (Bt) toxins could be deployed more effectively in transgenic crops by exploiting the role of insect-borne bacteria that enhance insecticidal activity," the Wisconsin team writes in its PNAS report. What's more, the insight that gut microbes mediate the effects of bacterial toxins could have application in hu...

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