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Neuronal 'traffic jam' marks early Alzheimer's disease

Early Alzheimer's disease may be precipitated by a "traffic jam" within neurons that causes swelling and prevents proper transport of proteins and structures in the cells, according to new studies by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers. In mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and in human brain samples from people with the disease, researchers observed a characteristic breakdown in...

Weill Cornell Research Reveals Secrets Of Trafficking Within Cells

As you read this, cells in your eye are transmitting information to your brain, while cells in your heart and arteries work just as hard to keep that brain alive. Every one of these cells -- and others throughout the body -- depends on an internal process called endocytosis to keep the flow of cellular nutrients and information healthy and strong. It's an incredibly important life process,...

Breast-Cancer Risk Linked to Exposure to Traffic Emissions at Menarche, First Birth

Exposure to carcinogens in traffic emissions at particular lifetime points may increase the risk of developing breast cancer in women who are lifetime nonsmokers, a study by epidemiologists and geographers at the University at Buffalo has found. Their study was conducted among women who lived in Erie and Niagara counties of New York State between 1996 and 2001. They found that higher expo...

Discovery of T-cell 'traffic control' boosts new drug promise

Scientists have begun to clarify how one of the body's molecules controls the trafficking of T cells through the blood, lymph nodes and on to tissues to fight infection -- a crucial response that sometimes goes awry, attacking the body's own tissues and causing autoimmune diseases. The traffic control system -- composed of a fat-like compound called S1P and its receptor on T cells -- usual...

Cells direct membrane traffic by channel width

For a glycerol molecule, a measly angstrom's difference in diameter is a road-closed sign: You can't squeeze through unless you are a sleek, water-molecule-sized sports car, say scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The roadway is in aquaporins, a class of proteins that form trans-membrane channels in cell walls in all forms of life. They allow for water movement be...

Bugs expose underground carbon traffic system 10 times more important than fossil fuel burning

The flow of carbon through soil is ten times greater than the amount of carbon moved around by the burning of fossil fuel but until now how this happens was at best poorly understood. Soil was almost literally a black box to scientists interested in carbon. Now researchers at the University of Warwick have been able to shed light in that black box by getting a particular class of insects to expos...

The brain, traffic and nano-circuits -- e-Science takes on major challenges

Research into three major scientific and technological challenges is to receive a major boost from the application of e-Science and grid computing. The challenges are, understanding the brain, mapping the detailed environmental impact of traffic and designing future generation nano-scale electronic circuits. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and other funding p...

Molecular mechanism provides intra-cellular traffic signal

City planners could learn a lesson or two from tiny cells on how to maximize traffic flow. The molecula...

Cellular traffic backups implicated in skeletal malformations

A defective link in the intracellular protein "transit system" may lie at the heart of some craniofacial defects, new research in zebrafish suggests. In the Sept. 17 online issue of Nature Genetics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers report the identification of a mutation that causes severe skeletal deformities in zebrafish by shutting down a critical protein transport pat...

New imaging technique tracks traffic patterns of white blood cells

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have just developed an advanced imaging technique to capture the movement of the microdomains of leukocytes or white blood cells. Microdomains are restricted areas on the surface of the cells in which receptors and signaling molecules accumulate during cell activation. Using digital multi-channel videomicroscopy, researchers were able to view white bl...

A 'traffic light' for neurons means 'go' for improving brain research

Every thought, feeling and action originates from the electrical signals emitted by diverse brain cells enmeshed in a tangle of circuits. At this fundamental level, scientists struggle to explain the mind. Worse yet, they have lacked tools to understand what's going wrong in patients with ailments such as depression or Parkinson's disease. New Stanford-led research published in the April 5 issue...