ICAT

Scientists Replicate Hepatitis C Virus in Laboratory

For the first time, scientists have replicated hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the laboratory. The ability to replicate HCV in cell culture will allow researchers to better study the life cycle and biology of this virus and to test potential antiviral compounds, which may lead to new therapies for the liver disease that results from infection with HCV. Scientists at the National Institute of Diabetes...

New imaging method gives early indication if brain cancer therapy is effective, U-M study shows

A special type of MRI scan that measures the flow of water molecules through the brain can help doctors determine early in the course of brain cancer regimen if a patient's tumor will shrink, a new study shows. Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center developed the assessment, which they call a functional diffusion map. They used a magnetic resonance imaging sc...

Elephants imitate sounds as a form of social communication

Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today's Nature, further supports the idea that vocal learning is important for maintaining individual social relationships among animals that separate and reunite over time, like dolphins and whales, some bi...

An entropy-based gene selection method for cancer classification using microarray data

Accurate diagnosis of cancer subtypes remains a challenging problem. Building classifiers based on gene expression data is a promising approach; yet the selection of non-redundant but relevant genes is difficult. The selected gene set should be small enough to allow diagnosis even in regular clinical laboratories and ideally identify genes involved in cancer-specific regulatory pathways. Here an...

Ice core 'dipstick' indicates West Antarctic ice has thinned less than believed

Rising sea levels 20,000 years ago, as the last ice age was beginning to wane, often are attributed in part to melting in West Antarctica. But in a new study led by University of Washington researchers, an ice core of 1,000 meters was used as a sort of dipstick to show that a key section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet probably never contained as much ice as scientists originally thought...

PANTHER Protein Classification System Database 5.0

PANTHER, a protein classification system fromApplied Biosystems, got updated to version 5.0. Proteins are classifiedby family, molecular and biological function (GO ontology) and knownpathways. Its main use is probably microarray analysis - it incorporateautomated GO surrepresentation analysis with graphical output. Best ofall, its available f...

New research indicates a 'troubled' greenhouse is brewing

Climates like those of the movie "Monsoon Wedding" may extend more widely into Africa, North America and South America, according to a University of Oregon geologist's analysis of an ancient greenhouse event. "We know the gathering greenhouse will be warm, but this new information confirms that the contrast between the rainy season and the dry season will increase dramatically," says Greg...

Breakthrough method in nanoparticle synthesis paves the way for new pharmaceutical and biomedical applications

The Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) has developed a novel method to simultaneously control the size and morphology of nanoparticles, which can be used in pharmaceutical synthesis and novel biomedical applications. This groundbreaking research was recently featured in the leading Chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie, and a United States patent has been filed on the inv...

Sequencing of marine bacterium will help study of cell communication

The opportunity to annotate the genome of the glow-in-the-dark bacterium, Vibrio fischeri, which lives in symbiotic harmony within the light organ of the bobtail squid, has helped a Virginia Tech microbiologist advance her research on quorum sensing, or how cells communicate and function as a community. Researchers studying the newly sequenced genome of the marine bacterium V. fischeri, d...

Wiley announces publication of Databasing the Brain

Understanding the structure, function, and development of the brain in health and disease represents one of the great scientific challenges of our time. The emerging field of neuroinformatics integrates neuroscience with informatics to create unique databases and analytical tools for the large variety of neuroscience data types, applying them to brain research and linking them with databases with...

Towards precise classification of cancers based on robust gene functional expression profiles

Chemists say they have identified a gene that appears to play a key role in the development of type 1 diabetes, also known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes, a disease that affects about one million people in the U.S. and is on the rise worldwide. They described their findings, which they say could lead to new drug interventions and possibly gene therapy, today at the 229th national meeti...

Researchers develop rapid diagnostic tool for pathogen identification

Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Columbia Genome Center have designed and developed a sensitive new diagnostic technology platform, called “Mass Tag PCR,?that can simultaneously screen for multiple infectious agents. The new technology is addressed in a paper published in the February issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Emerg...

Supercomputer Dedicated To Bioengineering, Computational Biology Installed

The University of California, San Diego, with support from the National Institutes of Health and the Whitaker Foundation, has installed a supercomputer dedicated to solving a wide range of challenging biological problems. The 210-node Dell PowerEdge Linux cluster capable of 2.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, the second most powerful computer cluster on campus, will be used to analyz...

NIH Calls on Scientists to Speed Public Release of Research Publications

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today a new policy designed to accelerate the public's access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy ?the first of its kind for NIH ?calls on scientists to release to the public manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication. These peer-reviewed, NIH-f...

Mystery Blood Vessel Disorder Implicated In 'Mini' Strokes

Physicians have long been puzzled by a condition called intracranial arterial dolichoectasia, in which the larger arteries of the brain become elongated and misshapen. Typically, it has been considered a complication of atherosclerosis ("hardening of the arteries"), and not directly life-threatening. However, there is recent evidence that people with dolichoectasia are more likely to have aortic...

CoPub Mapper: mining MEDLINE based on search term co-publication

High throughput microarray analyses result in many differentially expressed genes that are potentially responsible for the biological process of interest. In order to identify biological similarities between genes, publications from MEDLINE were identified in which pairs of gene names and combinations of gene name with specific keywords were co-mentioned. MEDLINE search strings for 15,621...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

It's a cloudless July afternoon in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, and ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell is scanning the horizon for elephants. "It's so fantastic here," she says. "We're constantly seeing elephants, rhinos, zebras, ostriches--it's the Garden of Eden." A research associate in the Stanford University School of Medicine, O'Connell-Rodwell has come to one of Afric...

Biochemists report discovery of structure of major piece of telomerase; implications for cancer

UCLA biochemists have determined the three-dimensional structure of a major domain of telomerase, the enzyme that helps maintain telomeres ?small pieces of DNA on the ends of chromosomes that act as protective caps -- allowing DNA ends to be copied completely when cells are replicated. This is the first major piece of telomerase for which the structure is known. Telomerase plays a key rol...

Product improves peptide identification for proteomics research

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced a high-performance ion trap mass spectrometer (MS) that allows pharmaceutical and academic life-science researchers to identify 60 to 80 percent more peptides than preceding models in proteomics applications, such as protein identification and biomarker discovery, potentially leading to a better understanding of diseases like cancer and speedin...

Findings have implications for tracking disease, drugs at the molecular level

Researchers in the laboratory of Boston College Chemistry Professor John T. Fourkas have demonstrated that gold particles comparable in size to a molecule can be induced to emit light so strongly that it is readily possible to observe a single nanoparticle. Fourkas, in collaboration with postdoctoral researcher Richard Farrer and BC undergraduates Francis Butterfield and Vincent Chen, coaxed the...

Unchecked DNA replication drives earliest steps toward cancer

Although not widely appreciated as a disease of the genes, cancer is always rooted in genetic errors or problems in gene regulation. Scientists have identified some of the first genetic triggers for cancer as mutations in specific oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes. Full-blown tumors and metastatic cancers, however, often exhibit many genetic mutations, sometimes dozens in a given tumor. An impo...

Science study holds implications for gene therapy and stem cell biology

A study in the May 20 issue of Science holds mixed blessings for scientists who follow research in gene therapy and stem cell biology. The study, conducted by scientists from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and Hannover Medical School and Hamburg University in Germany, reveals important evidence that tells us more about how blood forming stem cells regenerate. On the other hand, sc...

Computational verification of protein-protein interactions by orthologous co-expression

In the March 3 issue of Nature, Johns Hopkins researchers report that two proteins best known for very different activities actually come together to turn the liver into a sugar-producing factory when food is scarce. Because the liver's production of sugar is a damaging problem in people with diabetes, the proteins' interaction might be a target for future drugs to fight the disease, the research...

Lipids get new comprehensive classification system

In response to the growing number of lipids expected to be discovered through lipidomics and in anticipation of the massive amounts of data that will be generated by the lipid community, an international group of scientists has developed a comprehensive classification, nomenclature, and chemical representation system for lipids. The details of the system appear in the May issue of the Journal of...

Understanding how bacteria communicate may help scientists prevent disease

Rahul Kulkarni, assistant professor of physics at Virginia Tech, has been awarded a Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities to continue his research on quorum sensing in bacteria. He is modeling the sequence of events that initiate activity, such as virulence, by a bacteria colony once it has reached a critical size. The Powe award provides see...

Cancer related gene p53 not regulated as indicated by previous tissue culture research

The cellular cascade of molecular signals that instructs cells with fatally damaged DNA to self-destruct pivots on the p53 tumor suppressor gene. If p53 is inactivated, as it is in over half of all human cancers, checks and balances on cell growth fail to operate, and body cells start to accumulate mutations, which ultimately may lead to cancer. Not surprisingly, the regulation of this vital safe...

Protein synthesis can be controlled by light, opening way for new scientific, medical applications

Proteins are the puzzle-pieces of life, involved in how organisms grow and flourish, but studying their complex biological processes in living systems has been extremely difficult. Now, a team of chemists and neurobiologists led by Timothy Dore at the University of Georgia and Erin M. Schuman at the California Institute of Technology has found a way to use light to regulate protein synthesis in s...

Study finds adult stem cells can replicate

Scientists have found a new role for a previously identified enzyme that may make it a target for anti-inflammatory treatments. The finding by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that an enzyme known as cathepsin G regulates the ability of immune cells known as neutrophils to secrete chemicals that attract other immune cells and start the local infla...

Big differences in duplicated DNA distinguish chimp and human genomes

A study comparing the genomes of both humans and chimpanzees has found that much of the genetic difference between the two species came about in events called segmental duplications, in which segments of genetic code are copied many times in the genome. The study appears as a companion article to the draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome published in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Nature....

Modified collagen could yield important medical applications

Altered protein could help deliver drugs and shape the growth of engineered tissueCollagen often pops up in beauty products and supermodel lips. But by mating collagen with a molecular hitchhiker, materials scientists at Johns Hopkins hope to create some important medical advances. The researchers have found a simple new way to modify collagen, paving the way for better infection-fighting bandage...

Researchers develop new method for facile identification of proteins in bacterial cells

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed a new method for identifying specific proteins in whole cell extracts of microorganisms using traditional peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF). The key to the new method, according to the researchers, is a "shortcut" for preparing samples that makes PMF faster and more economical. By reducing the cost of protein identi...

Identification of specific genes predicts which patients will respond to Hepatitis C treatment

For the first time, physicians at University Health Network and University of Toronto have identified a small subset of genes that can predict whether a patient with chronic Hepatitis C will be able to respond to current treatments. The study, published in t...

Double trouble: Cells with duplicate genomes can trigger tumors

Abnormal cell division that yields cells with an extra set of chromosomes can initiate the development of tumors in mice, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have shown, validating a controversial theory about cancer causation put forth by a scientific visionary nearly 100 years ago. The so-called "double-value" cells are produced by random errors in cell division that occur with u...

Novel mechanism for DNA replication discovered

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers first to discover that a protein can provide the coding information for DNA replicationSince the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, the paradigm for DNA replication has stated that the DNA itself codes for the appropriate pairings for replication. In other words, if a guanine base is on the original strand...

Analysis of flower genes reveals the fate of an ancient gene duplication

In a step that advances our ability to discern the ancient evolutionary relationships between different genes and their biological functions, researchers have provided insight into the present-day outcome of a single gene duplication that occurred over a hundred million years ago in an ancestor of modern plants. The work is reported in Current Biology by a team led by Brendan Davies of the Univer...

Modification of program enables prediction of gene transcription

A modification to an "ace" gene prediction program by computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis now enables scientists to predict the very beginnings of gene transcription start sites and where the first splice occurs thereby defining the first exon of the gene. The modification to the gene prediction software TWINSCAN is called N-SCAN. Michael Brent, Ph.D. professor of com...

Muscle repair: Making a good system better, faster; implications for aging, disease

Skeletal muscles naturally repair themselves very efficiently after injury. But when they don't, otherwise successful recovery following damage from overuse during exercise, surgery or trauma can be stymied. Furthermore, as we age, muscle repair slows noticeably, and in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and other degenerative muscle diseases, normal repair functions can't cope with disease progression....

Breakthrough in micro-device fabrication combines biology and synthetic chemistry

Nanostructured micro-devices may be mass produced at a lower cost, and with a wider variety of shapes and compositions than ever before, for dramatic improvements in device performance by utilizing very small biologically produced structures. These entirely new biologically-enabled approaches are detailed in the current issue of the International Journal of Applied Ceramic Technology, published o...

'Underground' tunnels discovered as means for communication between immune system cells

University of Pittsburgh researchers first to report function of tunneling nanotubules Immune system cells are connected to each other by an extensive network of tiny tunnels that, like a building's hidden pneumatic tube system, are used to shoot signals to distant cells. This surprising discovery, being reported by two University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers in the Septem...

Protein amplification in melanoma is possible drug target

A newly discovered gene mutation may account for many cases of immune deficiency, in particular two syndromes known as immunoglobulin A (IgA) deficiency and Common Variable Immunodeficiency (CVID), report researchers in the July issue of Nature Genetics. The discovery may lead to a new diagnostic test for these conditions, which make people highly susceptible to infections and often go unrecogniz...