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New, automated tool successfully classifies and relates proteins in unprecedented way

For the first time, researchers haveautomatically grouped fluorescently tagged proteins fromhigh-resolution images of cells. This technical feat opens a new way toidentify disease proteins and drug targets by helping to show whichproteins cluster together inside a cell.The approach, developed by Carnegie Mellon University, outperformsexisting visual methods to localize proteins inside cells...

“Nano-scissors?laser shows precise surgical capability

)is quite a challenge; its about 1 mm in length. A research team fromthe University of Texas at Austin developed a method of laser-assistedsurgery to work on these little beasts, being able to section a singleaxon (the "arms" of a neuron) with g...

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...

Unprecedented water level rise in Somalia

In East Africa, where days of heavy rains and flooding have led to numerous deaths and entire villages being wiped out, locals are reporting an unprecedented rise in Somalia's Shabelle River and that a major water surge may be headed into the centre of the country, the United Nations said today. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), reports yesterd...

Precise Timing Enabled Pig-to-rat Transplants To Cure Diabetes

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have learned that a temporal "window of opportunity" was critical to their earlier successes in treating diabetic rats with embryonic pig tissues. In those experiments, published in 2004, researchers were surprised to find that they didn't have to give anti-rejection drugs to diabetic rats treated with embryonic pig cell...

New law for resolution allows unprecedented sharpness in fluorescence microscopy

Max Planck researchers have succeeded in overcoming the law postulated by Ernst Abbe in 1873 for diffraction limited resolution in light microscopes. Stefan Hell and his co-workers have established a new law that promises unlimited resolution in flu...

Surgical Robot 'Scrubs In' At UNC, May Be More Precise Than Conventional Surgery

The new surgical assistant at the University of North Carolina Hospitals arrived in February sporting three arms, a computerized brain and a glowing track record in helping to repair heart valves, remove cancerous prostates, bypass blocked coronary arteries and perform gastric bypass operations for morbid obesity. The new arrival is a robotic machine, the da Vinci Surgical System, manufact...

Male elephants woo females with precise chemistry

The exact chemical blend of a pheromone emitted by older male elephants in musth influences both a female elephant's interest in mating and how other surrounding elephants behave, a new study has found. The researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Auckland in New Zealand say the release of a specific proportion of two mirror images of the pheromone, fron...

Preclinical study of a new brain tumor therapy

Scientists have devised a strategy to treat tumors by selectively targeting and killing the malignant cells. A new preclinical study, published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine, has applied the approach to combat glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). This is the most aggressive form of brain tumour, growing very quickly before symptoms are experienced and killing most patients within a year of d...

Report finds cruise industry is protecting the precious places it visits

The major players in the cruise industry, including cruise lines, local governments and shore operators ?in collaboration with civil society organizations - are taking proactive measures to ensure a sustainable future for cruise tourism while preserving cruise destinations, according to a new report titled From Ship to Shore: Sustainable Stewardship in Cruise Destinations issued by Conservation I...

Tramiprosate (Alzhemed? preclinical results published in Neurobiology of Aging

Neurochem Inc. (NASDAQ: NRMX; TSX: NRM) is pleased to announce that Neurobiology of Aging, one of the world's leading peer-reviewed medical journals in the fields of gerontology and neuroscience, has published an online version of a publication on the preclinical development of tramiprosate (3-amino-1-propanesulfonic acid; Alzhemed?, including efficacy results in a mouse model of brain amyloidosi...

Fatty spheres loaded with siRNA shrink ovarian cancer tumors in preclinical trial

A molecular "off" switch packaged in a tiny sphere penetrates deeply into ovarian cancer tumor cells, stifling a troublesome protein and drastically reducing the size of tumors, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the Aug. 15 edition of Clinical Cancer Research. The mouse model experiment, featured on the cover of the journal, demonstrates a poten...

Precision biochemistry tracks DNA damage in fish

Like coal-mine canaries, fish DNA can serve as a measure of the biological impact of water and sediment pollution--or pollution clean-up. That's one of the conclusions of a new study* by researchers from the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Research ov...

Pourquié lab identifies genes involved in formation of vertebral precursors

Mary Lee Dequeant, Ph.D., a Predoctoral Researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, and Olivier Pourquié, Ph.D., Stowers Institute Investigator and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, are the first and last authors, respectively, on a paper that identifies a network of cyclic genes that shed light on the molecular basis of spine formation in the embryo. <...

Transplanted photoreceptor precursor cells restore visual function in mice with retinal degeneration

Scientists have successfully transplanted light-sensing cells called photoreceptors directly into the eyes of mice and restored their visual function. The achievement is based on a novel technology in which the cells are introduced at a particular stage in their development. It was carried out at the London Institute of Ophthalmology using a novel approach developed at the University of...

MIT's ocean model precisely mimics microbes' life cycles

Scientists at MIT have created an ocean model so realistic that the virtual forests of diverse microscopic plants they "sowed" have grown in population patterns that precisely mimic their real-world counterparts. This model of the ocean is the first to reflect the vast diversity of the invisible forests living in our oceans-tiny, single-celled green plants that dominate the ocean and produ...

Dual gene therapy suppresses lung cancer in preclinical test

Combination gene therapy delivered in lipid-based nanoparticles drastically reduces the number and size of human non-small cell lung cancer tumors in mice, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report in the Jan. 15 edition of Cancer Research. Two tumor-suppressing genes given intravenously reduced cancer...