Epi

It's not all genetic: Common epigenetic problem doubles cancer risk in mice

In experiments with mice, a team of scientists from the United States, Sweden and Japan has discovered that having a double dose of one protein is sufficient to change the normal balance of cells within the lining of the colon, thereby doubling the risk that a cancer-causing genetic mutation will trigger a tumor there. Roughly 10 percent of people have this double protein dose as well. In...

Scientists Propose Sweeping Changes to Naming of Bird Neurosystems to Acknowledge Their True Brainpower

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval to Mylan Technologies, Inc., for the first generic version of Alza Corporation's Duragesic Patch (Fentanyl Transdermal System) used to treat patients suffering from severe chronic pain that cannot be managed with alternative analgesics. When applied to the skin, this patch technology delivers fentanyl, an opioid pain medication that is s...

UCSD research reveals mechanism involved with type of fatal epilepsy

Researchers at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have found that Lafora disease, an inherited form of epilepsy that results in death by the age of 30, can be caused by mutations in a gene that regulates the concentration of the protein laforin. These findings are reported in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Lafora disease is characterize...

The circadian clock: Understanding nature's timepiece

A cluster of brain cells less than half the size of a pencil eraser tells you when to wake up, when to be hungry and when it's time to go to sleep. The same cells also cause you to be disoriented after you've flown across multiple time zones. The human circadian clock, comprised of about 20,000 time-keeping cells, has mystified scientists since it was pinpointed in the brain about 30 year...

B cells are required for development of epithelial cancer associated with chronic inflammation

Chronic inflammation is linked to the development of certain types of cancer, but mechanisms mediating inflammation during premalignancy are not well understood. A new research study published in the May issue of Cancer Cell identifies B lymphocytes as important regulators of premalignancy associated with chronic inflammation. The results suggest that drugs targeted against B lymphocytes or recru...

Newly discovered protein an important tool for sleeping sickness research

Sixty million people in 36 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are threatened daily by a deadly parasitic disease known as African sleeping sickness. The disease is caused by organisms called trypanosomes, which are spread by the tsetse fly. African sleeping sickness affects approximately 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, a quarter of whom will die this year. Because the trypanosome has an except...

Understanding biases in epidemic models important when making public health predictions

Mathematical models have become invaluable decision-making tools for public health officials. As demonstrated during the United Kingdom's foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, models can be useful in two ways: they can reveal the underlying characteristics of an infection and they can allow the comparison of alternative control measures. Often, however, such models make implicit assumptions that may s...

Sleeping Sickness Epidemic Spreading in Uganda

A drug first used to reduce the risk of stomach ulcers in people taking certain types of painkillers offers an alternative to surgery after miscarriage, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health and other research institutions. The study appears in the August 18, 2005, New England Journal of Med...

Compound might defeat African sleeping sickness, clinical trial beginning this month

One of the most devastating diseases in sub-Saharan Africa almost disappeared in the late 1950s. That disease, African sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, largely succumbed to heroic public health efforts -- including relocating entire villages. But in the past several decades, because of post-colonial turmoil, the catastrophic illness has come back to ravage parts of Angola, the Democratic Re...

Mayan stingless bee keeping: Going, going, gone?

Long before Europeans brought honey bees (Apis mellifera) to the Americas, Mayan bee keepers harvested honey from the log nests of stingless bees native to tropical forests. Now, colleagues from the Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Quintana Roo, Mexico and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) warn of the imminent demise of stingless bee keeping on the Yucatan ?a result of ongoing cultu...

Sleeping beauty plays a significant role in identifying cancer genes

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, have discovered a new method that could accelerate the way cancer-causing genes are found and could lead to a more accurate identification of the genes, according to two studies in the July 14, 2005, issue of Nature. The gene identification method was...

Researcher says flu responders can learn from 1918 epidemic

A doctoral student's research brings lessons and insight to a looming pandemic While that prospect would terrify the average person, it also intrigues Jim Higgins, a doctoral candidate at Lehigh Unive...

Creeping crinoids! Sea lilies crawl to escape predators, new video shows

With their long stalks and feathery arms, marine animals known as sea lilies look a lot like their garden-variety namesakes. Perhaps because of that resemblance, scientists had always assumed that sea lilies stayed rooted instead of moving around lik...

Lethal needle blight epidemic may be related to climate change

Increased summer precipitation apparently helping to spread spores of pathogen Biologists studying a lethal blight of lodgepole pines in northwestern British Columbia present strong evidence in the September issue of BioScience that climate change is to blame for the outbreak. The blight, caused by the fungus Dothistroma septosporum, causes trees to lose their needles and, in the case of...

New view of cancer: 'Epigenetic' changes come before mutations

A Johns Hopkins researcher, with colleagues in Sweden and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, suggests that the traditional view of cancer as a group of diseases with markedly different biological properties arising from a series of alterations within a cell's nuclear DNA may have to give way to a more complicated view. In the January issue of Nature Reviews Genetics, available online...

New study pinpoints epicenters of Earth's imminent extinctions

Safeguarding 595 sites around the world would help stave off an imminent global extinction crisis, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( Conducted by scientists working with the 52 member organizations of the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE –?<A HREF="http://www.zeroextinction.org...

New U. of Colorado at Boulder flu chip may help combat future epidemics, pandemics

A novel "Flu Chip" developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder that can determine the genetic signatures of specific influenza strains from patient samples within hours may help world health officials combat coming epidemics and pandemics. Tests last month on the new technology by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta showed the CU-Boulder Flu Chip can determine...

Sleeping sickness parasite shows how cells divide their insides

Researchers at Yale have brought to light a mechanism that regulates the way an internal organelle, the Golgi apparatus, duplicates as cells prepare to divide, according to a report in Science Express. ,...

Ernst Mayr's theory illustrated in genetic epidemiology studies

The late, famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr's theory of genetic revolution , introduced in 1954, remains controversial to this day and has many detractors. Mayr believed that genes interacted with one another, and that this genetic interaction in turn led to an interaction of natural selection with genetic drift that could cause genetic revolution ?new directions of evolutionary ch...

Waking a sleeping virus

A detailed structural picture of a molecule that plays a key role in activating the Epstein Barr Virus in human cells has now been obtained by researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Institut de Virologie Moléculaire et Structurale (IVMS), associated with the Université Jos...

International HIV/AIDS trial finds continuous antiretroviral therapy superior to episodic therapy

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced that enrollment into a large international HIV/AIDS trial comparing continuous antiretroviral therapy with episodic drug treatment guided by levels of CD4+ cells has been stopped. Enrollment was stopped because those patients receiving episodic therapy had twice the...

A large step forward in the fight against African sleeping sickness

Each year, over 300,000 people die of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Free University of Brussels are making strides in the battle against this disease. They have coupled the human protein ApoL-1 with a nanobody in order to very specifically eliminate the infection caused by the p...

Epidemic of unneeded amputations

Non-traumatic amputations ?those caused by arterial blockages related to diabetes, smoking, obesity and vascular system complications ?are occurring at an alarming rate. Yet physicians may be too quick to amputate as 85 percent of them may be preventable, according to the International Diabetes Foundation. Amputations are not only disfiguring and life-threatening, but are more dangerous an...

Ritalin packs punch by elevating norepinephrine, suppressing nerve signal transmissions

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) elevates norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli, a Philadelphia research team has found. Their report in the Journal of Neurophysiology helps explain how a stimulant aids people with attention deficit and hyperactivity...

In a technical tour de force, Salk scientists take a global view of the epigenome

A collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California at Los Angeles captured the genome-wide DNA methylation pattern of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana - the "laboratory rat" of the plant world - in one big sweep. "In a single experiment we recapitulated 20 years worth of anecdotal findings and then some," says senior author Jos...

UGA study explains peaks and troughs of dengue epidemics

Scientists have long known that epidemics of dengue fever wax and wane over a period of several years, but they've never been quite sure why. With the incidence and range of the potentially deadly mosquito-borne illness increasing, understanding the factors that influence these epidemics has never been more important. A new study by researchers at the University of Georgia suggests that a...

Septum keeps neurons in synch, can reduce epileptic seizures by 90 percent

The brain's septum helps prevent epileptic seizures by inducing rhythmical electrical activity in the circuits of another area of the brain known as the hippocampus, according to a new study in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The researchers found that, by imposing a normal "theta" rhythm on chronically epileptic rats, they could reduce epileptic seizures by 86-97 percent. The study "Septo...

Gatekeeping: Penn researchers find new way to open ion channels in cell membranes

Using an enzyme found in the venom of the brown recluse spider, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered a new way to open molecular pores, called ion channels, in the membrane of cells. The research team ?Zhe Lu, MD, PhD; Yajamana Ramu, PhD; and Yanping Xu, MD, PhD of the Department of Physiology at Penn ?screened venoms from over 100 poisonous invertebrat...

UGA researchers find that hunting can increase the severity of wildlife disease epidemics

A new study by University of Georgia researchers shows that the common practice of killing wild animals to control disease outbreaks can actually make matters worse in some cases. In a study published the August 7 edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, post-doctoral researcher Marc Choisy and Pejman Rohani, associate professor of ecology and UGA Bi...

Weizmann Institute scientists discover a molecular security mechanism for keeping mutations in check

Everyone knows mutations ?genetic mistakes in DNA, the material of heredity ?are bad: The more mutations in the cell's DNA, the higher the risk of cancer developing. But in the last few years it has become clear that the very processes that generate mutations, if they take place at a relatively low frequency, can actually protect us from cancer. How does the body know how to keep these processes...

New neurons could act to alleviate epilepsy

The new neurons generated as a result of neural damage due to epilepsy show a reduced excitability that could alleviate the disorder, researchers have found. The researchers said their results suggest that therapies for epilepsy aimed at inducing neurogenesis could prove effective in alleviating the disorder. In an article in the December 21, 2006, issue of the journal Neuron, published by...

Resistance and genetic sensitivity to sleeping sickness

Human African trypanosomiasis, more commonly called sleeping sickness, is induced by a parasite, the trypanosome, transmitted to humans by the bite of an insect, the glossinid tse-tse fly. There has been a resurgence of this disease over the past 20 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) in a 1998 report estimated the number of people infected to be about 300 000. Awaren...

First biomarker for human sleepiness identified in fruit flies

Scientists have identified the first biochemical marker linked to sleep loss, an enzyme in saliva known as amylase, which increases in activity when sleep deprivation is prolonged. Researchers hope to make amylase the first of a panel of biomarkers that will aid diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders and may one day help assess the risk of falling asleep at the wheel of a car or in oth...

New study suggests promising drug combinations for sleeping sickness

Results from a clinical trial evaluating new drug combinations for sleeping sickness, carried out by the international humanitarian medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and its research arm, Epicentre, have now been published in the journal PLoS Clinical Trials. African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness affects many tens of thousands of people each year in sub-Sahara...

Gene therapy inhibits epilepsy in animals

For the first time, researchers have inhibited the development of epilepsy after a brain insult in animals. By using gene therapy to modify signaling pathways in the brain, neurology researchers found that they could significantly reduce the development of epileptic seizures in rats. "We have shown that there is a window to intervene after a brain insult to reduce the risk that epilepsy w...

Anti-dandruff compound may help fight epilepsy

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that the same ingredient used in dandruff shampoos to fight the burning, itching and flaking on your head also can calm overexcited nerve cells inside your head, making it a potential treatment for seizures. Results of the study can be found online in Nature Chemical Biology. Epilepsy and other seizure disorders result when nerves excessively o...

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...

Master regulatory gene of epithelial stem cells identified

The skin’s ability to replace the tissue it sloughs off is controlled by a variety of genes. A new study from Harvard Medical School published in the May 4 issue of Cell, however, identifies a "master regulator" of this regeneration process not only for skin, but for many epithelial tissues including breast, prostate, and urogenital tract. This master regulator of epithelial stem cells turns out...

Keeping the immune system from starting a 'food fight'

After every meal, the body must prevent the immune system from launching an all-out fight against food. Now, researchers report the identity of a nutrient "floodgate" that serves to protect against such an inflammatory immune response. Their findings appear in the May 4, 2007 issue of the journal Cell, a publication of Cell Press. The researchers found that animals lacking a protein enrich...

US control strategies may make flu epidemics worse, UCLA study shows

Regular as clockwork, the flu arrives every year. And, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5 to 20 percent of the U.S. population on average will come down with it. About 36,000 people will die. But among health experts, a bigger concern than the seasonal flu is an outright flu pandemic, such as a human strain of avian flu. And officials say it is not a qu...