Cellular

Scientists discover the cellular roots of graying hair

Few things about growing older are asinevitable and obvious as “going gray,?yet scientists have been unableto explain the precise cause of this usually unwelcome transformation.In a report posted today on the Web site of the journal Science,researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s HospitalBoston say they have found the cellular cause of graying hair whileinvestigating th...

Vital step in cellular migration described by UCSD medical researchers

A vital molecular step in cell migration, the movement of cells within the body during growth, tissue repair and the body's immune response to invading pathogens, has been demonstrated by researchers in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. Published in the March 27 online edition of Nature Cell Biology and the journal's upcoming April print edition, the study describ...

MSI releases 'moleculizer' - a new approach to simulation of intracellular biochemical networks

Dr. Roger Brent, President and Director of Research at the the release of a new approach to simulation of intracellularbiochemical networks in the January 2005 edition of NatureBiotechnology.The research article, entit...

Molecular Motors Cooperate In Moving Cellular Cargo, Study Shows

Researchers using an extremely fast and accurate imaging technique have shed light on the tiny movements of molecular motors that shuttle material within living cells. The motors cooperate in a delicate choreography of steps, rather than engaging in the brute-force tug of war many scientists had imagined. "We discovered that two molecular motors -- dynein and kinesin -- do not compete for...

Cellular Defects in Premature Aging Disease are Reversible

Cells affected by Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) -- a disease associated with premature aging -- can be made healthy again, according to findings by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Using specially modified segments of DNA, NCI researchers Paola Scaffidi, PhD, and Tom Misteli, PhD, reversed the abnormalities seen in H...

New study to explore cellular circuitry

Project's goal to empower future drug designAs part of a $4.88 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), molecular biologists from the University of Rochester Medical Center will join a team seeking to create the first complete wiring diagram of a living cell. By wiring diagram, researchers mean a detailed model, not only of the cell's genes and their function, but also of the int...

Study provides insight into cellular defenses against genetic mutation

Nature's finesse revealed in quality surveillance systemWith their latest discovery, researchers have significantly advanced the understanding of how human cells protect themselves from constant and potentially destructive changes in gene expression. According to an article published in this month's Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the research is important because the protection itself...

Cellular scale drug delivery from the inside out

Delivering a dose of chemotherapy drugs to specific cancer cells without the risk of side affects to healthy cells may one day be possible thanks to a nanoscale drug delivery system being explored by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. Using tiny silica particles call mesoporous nanospheres to carry drugs inside living cells, Ames Laboratory chemist Victor Lin i...

Carnegie Mellon develops non-invasive technique to detect transplant rejection at cellular level

Carnegie Mellon University scientist Chien Ho and his colleagues have developed a promising tool that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track immune cells as they infiltrate a transplanted heart in the early stages of organ rejection. This pre-clinical advance, described in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ultimately could provide a non-invas...

Liver cancer linked to cellular repair pathway

The unchecked activity of a cell signaling pathway crucial in embryonic development and the liver's response to injury leads to liver cancer, researchers from Duke University Medical Center and John Hopkins University School of Medicine have found. Because the pathway, called Hedgehog, is present only in immature, stem-like liver cells, the discovery offers hope for targeted treatment of l...

New cellular flaw found in some virulent breast cancers

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a molecular interaction that triggers a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer, and suggest that attacking this target with selective drugs might improve treatment. In the January issue of Cancer Cell, a team led by Qunyan Yu, MD, and Peter Sicinski, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber report that the interaction of a certain mutated...

Insects that produce males from unfertilized eggs reveal a surprising cellular feat

Scientists have long known that the social insects in the order Hymenoptera--which includes ants, bees, and wasps--have an unusual mechanism for sex determination: Unfertilized eggs develop into males, while fertilized eggs become females. But the development of an unfertilized egg into an adult (called parthenogenesis) remains a mysterious process. One mystery has been the origin of the...

University of Minnesota researchers take new look at cellular suicide

Like a bodyguard turned traitor, a protein whose regular job is to help repair severed DNA molecules will, in some cases, join forces with another protein to do the opposite and chop the DNA to bits, according to new research at the University of Minnesota. The chopping up of a cell's DNA occurs in response to damage, for example, from ultraviolet light, and appears to be a means of killing the c...

RNA found in the cellular centrosome of surf clams

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Sciences Center have discovered the presence of the genetic material RNA in the centrosome, the organizing structure inside each cell that assures proper cell division. The findings, detailed June 5 in the online early edition of the journal Pro...

'Cellular antennae' on algae give clues to how human cells receive signals

By studying microscopic hairs called cilia on algae, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found that an internal structure that helps build cilia is also responsible for a cell's response to external signals. Cilia perform many functions on human cells; they propel egg and sperm cells to make fertilization possible, line the nose to pick up odors, and purify the blood, among...

How nature tinkers with the cellular clock

The life of a cell is all about growing and dividing at the right time. That is why the cell cycle is one of the most tightly regulated cellular processes. A control system with several layers adjusts when key components of the cell cycle machinery are produced, activated and degraded to make sure that the schedule is kept. These layers of control work differently and are usually studied separate...

UNC scientists solve mystery of how largest cellular motor protein powers movement

Scientists now understand how an important protein converts chemical energy to mechanical force, thus powering the process of cell division, thanks to a new structural model by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers. The structural model helps solve a scientific mystery: how the protein dynein fuels itself to perform cellular functions vital to life. These functions inclu...

Molecular mechanism provides intra-cellular traffic signal

City planners could learn a lesson or two from tiny cells on how to maximize traffic flow. The molecula...

Cellular traffic backups implicated in skeletal malformations

A defective link in the intracellular protein "transit system" may lie at the heart of some craniofacial defects, new research in zebrafish suggests. In the Sept. 17 online issue of Nature Genetics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers report the identification of a mutation that causes severe skeletal deformities in zebrafish by shutting down a critical protein transport pat...

Biologists probe the machinery of cellular protein factories

Proteins of all sizes and shapes do most of the work in living cells, and the DNA sequences in genes spell out the instructions for making those proteins. The crucial job of reading the genetic instructions and synthesizing the specified proteins is carried out by ribosomes, tiny protein factories humming away inside the cells of all living things. Harry Noller, the Sinsheimer Professor o...

Studies find general mechanism of cellular aging

Three separate studies confirm a gene that suppresses tumor cell growth also plays a key role in aging. The researchers found increasing concentration, or expression, of the gene p16INK4a in older cells; these aging cells worked poorly compared to young cells and remembered their "age" even when transferred from old mice to young mice. The cells of mice bred without the gene showed less sluggishn...

NYU biologists identify gene that coordinates two cellular processes

A team of biologists at New York University's Center for Comparative Functional Genomics has uncovered a dual role for the gene mel-28. The gene plays a part in ensuring that chromosomes are divided properly during cell division and it is required for nuclear envelope function. The findings appear in the journal Current Biology. The team is using functional genomic tools to study the...

Unicellular microRNA discovery

In the May 15th issue of Genes & Development, an international collaboration of researchers, led by Dr. Yijun Qi (National Institute of Biological Sciences, China), report on their discovery of microRNAs in the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is the first finding of microRNAs in a unicellular organism. “The finding changes the dogma that miRNAs only exist in m...

Turning a cellular sentinel into a cancer killer

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have developed two strategies to reactivate the p53 gene in mice, causing blood, bone and liver tumors to self destruct. The p53 protein is called the "guardian of the genome" because it triggers the suicide of cells with damaged DNA. Inactivation of p53 can set the stage for the development of different types of cancer. The researchers' findings...

Stem cell identity in culture may strongly depend on the cellular microenvironment

Identification, isolation and large scale culture of stem cells for potential medical applications is a major challenge in cell biology. In an upcoming PLoS ONE paper, researchers, including Andras Paldi, in Genethon (Evry, France) report, on the basis of experimental observations and computer simulations, that the stem cell identity in culture may strongly depend on the cellular microenvironment...

Microfluidic chip helps solve cellular mating puzzle

Using a biochemical version of a computer chip, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has solved a long-standing mystery related to the mating habits of yeast cells. The findings, described in the Feb. 18 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, shed new light on the way cells send and receive signals from one another and from the environment through a process called signal tr...

Prenatal cocaine's lasting cellular effects

Although the "crack baby" hysteria of the 1980s was greatly exaggerated, cocaine use during pregnancy can cause subtle but disabling cognitive impairments -- attention deficits, learning disabilities and emotional problems. A recent study by investigators at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development may help explain the long-term behavioral and neurological problems...

Keeping the body in sync -- The stability of cellular clocks

A study in Switzerland uses the tools of physics to show how our circadian clocks manage to keep accurate time in the noisy cellular environment. In an article appearing March 13 in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne demonstrate that the stability of cellular oscillators depends on specific biochemical processes, reflecting...

Cellular message movement captured on video

Scientists have captured on video the intracellular version of a postal delivery service. Reporting in the journal Bio...