Puzzl

Alaskan puzzles, monitoring provide insight about North Pacific salmon runs

The University of Washington Alaska Salmon Program, the world's longest-running effort to monitor salmon and their ecosystems, has received nearly $2.4 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand its sampling scope and sophistication. The Alaska-based program has applications for Pacific salmon all along the West Coast, providing insights into the fluctuating fortunes of s...

Researchers unlock mechanism creating jigsaw puzzle-like plant cells

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have unlocked the molecular give and take that allows cells in thin structures such as leaves to develop in a jigsaw-like pattern, providing the leaf a surprising degree of strength. The findings were published in today's edition of the journal Cell. Zhenbiao Yang, a professor of plant cell biology at the UCR's Center for Plant Cell Bi...

A puzzle piece found in unraveling the wiring of the brain

The complexity of the brain and, more specifically, how nerve cells form billions of contacts when there are fewer than 30,000 human genes is still a scientific mystery. A team headed by Drs. Robin Hiesinger and Hugo J. Bellen at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston have unraveled a piece of that puzzle by finding a gene that plays a key role in brain wiring. A report on their work appear...

Massey Cancer Center researcher helps to identify a piece of the cancer puzzle

A structural biologist from the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center, in collaboration with researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has identified the crystal structure of a protein that plays a role in supplying nutrients to solid tumors. This identification may help researchers gain a greater understanding of the cell signaling that occurs when cancer cell...

Unraveling a stomach cancer puzzle

It started several years ago with the observation that a large group of seemingly unconnected genes were behaving differently in patients with stomach cancer. Now a multi-national research team led by the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) has joined the proverbial dots and identified a potential new target for stomach cancer therapy, according to a paper publishe...

Major link in brain-obesity puzzle found

A single protein in brain cells may act as a linchpin in the body’s weight-regulating system, playing a key role in the flurry of signals that govern fat storage, sugar use, energy balance and weight, University of Michigan Medical School researchers report. And although it’s far too early to say how this protein could be useful in new strategies to fight the world’s epidemic of obesity,...

'Sinkers' provide missing piece in deep-sea puzzle

One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor off the coast of Central California. After analyzing hundreds of hours of deep-sea video, Bruce Robison and his...

Unweaving amyloid fibers to solve prion puzzles

Amyloid fibers are best known as the plaque that gunks up neurons in people with neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease--the human analog of mad cow disease. But even though amyloids are common and implicated in a host of conditions, researchers haven't been able to identify their precise molecular structures. Conventional techniques used to image proteins,...

Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle and point to 'hot soup' at the origin of life

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists believe. In a paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution this week, researchers from the University of Bath describe a new theory which they believe could solve a puzzle that has baf...

'Computer-chemistry' yields new insight into a puzzle of cell division

Duke University biochemists aided by Duke computer scientists and computational chemists have identified the likely way two key enzymes dock in an intricate three-dimensional puzzle-fit to regulate cell division. Solving the docking puzzle could lead to anticancer drugs to block the runaway cell division behind some cancers, said the researchers. Significantly, their insights arose not ju...

Bees solve complex colour puzzles

Bees have a much more sophisticated visual system than previously thought, according to a new UCL (University College London) study in which bees were able to solve complicated colour puzzles. The findings shed light on how brains resolve one of the most difficult challenges of vision - namely, recognizing different surfaces under different colours of illumination - by suggesting that bees solve...

UW scientists unravel critical genetic puzzle for flu virus replication

Like any other organism, an influenza virus's success in life is measured by its genetic track record, its ability to pass on genes from one generation to the next. Now, with the...

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...

MIT biologists solve vitamin puzzle

Solving a mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades, MIT and Harvard researchers have discovered the final piece of the synthesis pathway of vitamin B12-the only vitamin synthesized exclusively by microorganisms. B12, the most chemically complex of all vitamins, is essential for human health. Four Nobel Prizes have been awarded for research related to B12, but one fragment of the mol...

Scientists uncover new target in cancer mutation puzzle

University of Rochester scientists, while investigating the two most frequent types of mutations in cancer, discovered a possible new route to treatment that would take advantage of the mutations instead of trying to repair them. The research is reported online this week in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. In experiments with rodent and human cells, co-authors Mingxua...

Danish researches solve virus puzzle

How is virus as for example HIV and bird flu able to make the cells within a human body work for the purpose of the virus? Researchers at the University of Copenhagen shed new light on this question. The research is a collaboration between molecular biologists and physicists. ”The molecular biologists have knowledge of how the cell functions and of the interplay between the intercellular p...

Puzzling plankton yield secrets to role in evolution/global photosynthesis

The analysis of DNA sequences from tiny green algae have provided new insights into the mystery of how new species of plankton evolve—and further highlights their critical role in managing the global cycling of carbon. These findings, by a group led by the DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI); the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego; and the Pierre & Mari...