Enhanced

Mouse with designer liver has enhanced glucose tolerance, insulin response

A collaborative effort led by The Burnham Institute's Gen-Sheng Feng has created a mouse with improved glucose tolerance and insulin activity in the liver, and generated new findings about insulin-signaling in the liver that could prove useful in understanding the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes. These results, to be published by Nature Medicine in May, were made available to the scientific commu...

Study finds that nutritionally enhanced rice reduces iron deficiency

Breeding rice with higher levels of iron can have an important impact on reducing micronutrient malnutrition, according to a new study in the Journal of Nutrition. The research, conducted by scientists from the Philippines and the United States, is a major step forward in the battle against iron deficiency, one of the developing world's most debilitating and intractable public health problems aff...

Researchers report technique for freezing and preserving genetically enhanced pig embryos

Researchers led by a University of Missouri-Columbia professor of reproductive biotechnology have reported success in freezing and preserving swine embryos that were created by in vitro techniques and that carried modified genetic material. After thawing and transfer to a surrogate mother, some of the embryos went on to produce live piglets with new genetic traits. In a paper posted today...

Fish growth changes enhanced by climate change

Changes in growth rates in some coastal and long-lived deep-ocean fish species in the south west Pacific are consistent with shifts in wind systems and water temperatures, according to new Australian research published in the United States this week. “We have drawn correlations between the growth of fish species related to their environmental conditions ?faster growth in waters above a dep...

Making mice with enhanced color vision

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and their colleagues have found that mice simply expressing a human light receptor in addition to their own can acquire new color vision, a sign that the brain can adapt far more rapidly to new sensory information than anticipated. This work, appearing March 23 in Science, also suggests that when the first ancestral primate inherited a n...

Scientists genetically engineer tomatoes with enhanced folate content

Leafy greens and beans aren't the only foods that pack a punch of folate, the vitamin essential for a healthy start to pregnancy. Researchers now have used genetic engineering--manipulating an organism's genes--to make tomatoes with a full day's worth of the nutrient in a single serving. The scientists published their results in this week's online edition of the journal PNAS, Proceedings o...