coat in Biological News

TB bacterium uses its sugar coat to sweeten its chances of living in lungs

COLUMBUS, Ohio Common strains of tuberculosis-causing bacteria have hijacked the human body's immune response to play tricks on cells in the lungs, scientists say. The results of this takeover are mixed. The cells essentially welcome the bacteria into the lungs and invite them to stay a while,...

Researchers coat titanium with polymer to improve integration of joint replacements

Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology shows that coating a titanium implant with a new biologically inspired material enhances tissue healing, improves bone growth around the implant and strengthens the attachment and integration of the implant to the bone. "We designed a coating tha...

Tweedle coat fashions stocky flies

University of California, San Diego biologists have discovered that disruptions in genes they call Tweedles make fruit flies short and stout like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland. They report in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a...

Scientists seek to unwrap the sweet mystery of the sugar coat on bacteria

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a quick and simple way to investigate the sugar coating that surrounds bacteria and plays a role in infection and immunity. The sugars coating bacteria can change very quickly during the course of an infection, cloaking the bacteria f...

Nonstick and laser-safe gold aids laser trapping of biomolecules

... gold posts. These bonds were mechanically strong enough to withstand high-force laser trapping and chemically robust enough to allow the JILA team to coat the unreacted gold on each nanopost with a polymer cushion, which eliminated undesired sticking. Now you can anchor DNA to gold and keep the rest of t...

Researchers create freestanding nanoparticle films without fillers

...ng with a pair of electrodes. When an electric current is applied, it creates an electrical field in the liquid that attracts the nanoparticles, which coat the electrodes. Using colloids, mixtures with particles 10 to 1,000 times larger than nanoparticles, EDP is widely used to apply coatings to complex m...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- June 3, 2009

...rs from biting and eating them. Western Colombian natives have used skin extracts from another group of frogs, unrelated to those in the new study, to coat blow-darts for hunting. Frogs get nearly all of the alkaloids from their diet, removing alkaloids from ants, mites, small beetles, millipedes and ...

Genital stimulation opens door for cryptic female choice in tsetse flies

...modified male genital structures by cutting off a tooth that is typical of this species of tsetse fly and by smoothing a bristly surface by applying a coat of nail polish. In addition, they modified the sensations perceived by the female from these structures by altering the female sense organs on the por...

Study finds blood cells can be reprogrammed to act as embryonic stem cells

...to ES cells, the scientists analyzed the CD34+ iPS cell lines to see if they had acquired stem cell "markers," the unique combination of proteins that coat the cells' surface and distinguish them from other types of cells. Indeed, the iPS cell lines expressed the same markers as ES cells and further share...

American Chemical Society Weekly PressPac -- April 8, 2009

...oatings for soft or delicate underlying materials. Until recently, however, scientists knew little about the chemical mechanisms that allow mussels to coat the tendon-like fibers in byssal threads with a material that is both hard and extensible. The researchers conducted a detailed chemical analysis o...

Engineers develop method to disperse chemically modified graphene in organic solvents

...cal importance to many of these possible applications is the dispersion of graphene or chemically modified graphene in solvents that can, for example, coat products to make them stronger, stiffer and improve thermal and electrical conductivity. "A part of our research group has avidly pursued developin...

Scripps research team identifies key molecules that inhibit viral production

...epatitis C nucleocapsid, an essential step in the formation of infectious viral particles; the nucleocapsid is the viral genome protected by a protein coat the capsid. This core protein plays an essential role in the HCV cycle during assembly and release of the infectious virus, as well as disassembly of...

Scientists unlock the secrets of C. difficile's protective shell

...wo protein components is painstakingly difficult work. We're confident that continuing this work to better understand the formation of this protective coat and its exact function will reveal new targets for effective drugs to beat this dangerous pathogen, and could even lead to an effective vaccine." T...

'Experiment of nature' examines how mother's diet may impact on child's health

... the diet of pregnant mice can lead to very marked differences in their offspring with mice fed a folate-depleted diet producing litter with different coat colour or "kinked" tails compared to those fed a diet rich in folate. "Alterations in DNA methylation are thought to increase the risk of a child d...

Scripps scientists create first crystal structure of an intermediate particle in virus assembly

...rm. "The principles of this multi-stage protein coat assembly will likely be similar across all complex...of medical nanotechnology, he adds. "The immature coat has lots of holes in it through which we could loa...enes that encode the 420 proteins that make up the coat were expressed in e coli bacteria, the normal host...

Biologists solve mystery of black wolves

...gs, known as the K locus, is responsible for black coat color and was transferred to wolves through mating... The biologists are unsure of when the black coat color was transferred from dogs to wolves, but the... believe it was not a recent occurrence; the black coat could not have spread as widely as it has througho...

New method monitors critical bacteria in wastewater treatment

... wrote the paper, which is being highlighted in the journal's "spotlight" section. The biofilms are a matrix of wastewater-treatment organisms that coat natural or synthetic surfaces. A healthy population of the bacteria must be maintained for wastewater treatment facilities to operate properly, McLamo...

Inherited genetic cause, possible treatment found for complex lung disorder

...nary surfactant, a substance composed of lipids (fats) and proteins, causing labored breathing and respiratory failure. Surfactant's normal role is to coat lung tissues and keep the lungs from collapsing Finding an effective, non-invasive therapy would dramatically improve quality of life for children ...

'Femtomolar optical tweezers' may enable sensitive blood tests

...r. This occurs because the lasers' electric fields interact with electric charges on the objects. To detect disease-causing agents, researchers can coat a microsphere with antibody particles and then touch it to a surface containing infectious particles (antigens). The antigens then stick to the antibo...

Nanoscale coating protect products -- and the economy

... a disk, or "target," made of a particular element, sending energetic atoms from it scattering like billiard balls in a game of pool. Those atoms then coat the substrate in ultra-thin layers. A career of leadership Aita has accomplished many "firsts" since arriving at UWM in 1981. She was the first...

Novel publishing approach puts textbook in more hands

...f Glycobiology is the largest, most authoritative volume available on the structure, synthesis, and biology of glycans (sugar chains), molecules that coat cell surfaces and proteins and play important roles in many normal and disease processes. The book is written and edited by leaders in the field of g...

Caltech biologists spy on the secret inner life of a cell

...ived at the blood-vessel side of the cell, they fused with the cell membrane and delivered the antibody cargo. The vesicles also appeared to include a coat made from a molecule called clathrin, which helps form the outer shell of the vesicles. Researchers previously believed that a vesicle's clathrin cage...

Scripps research team solves structure of 'beneficial' virus

...f 253 viruses to date. Once the structure of Seneca Valley Virus-001 was solved, researchers went on to identify several areas on the viral protein coat that they think might hook onto receptors on cancer cells in the process of infecting them. The researchers are now conducting further investigations ...

Research about plant viruses could lead to new ways to improve crop yields

...ast, a member of one family must have obtained the coat protein gene from a member of the other family, an...viruses, the Closteroviridae, has the same protein coat as well. "Actually, the coat protein is not particularly good at protecting the...

St. Jude study gives new insights into how cells accessorize their proteins

... malfunctioning molecules without a system for proteins to "accessorize" in order to regulate their function. Just as eyeglasses improve vision, a coat provides warmth or an umbrella wards off rain, cells use a set of proteins called ubiquitin-like proteins (UBLs) as accessories that adapt their funct...

Coating improves electrical stimulation therapy used for Parkinson's, depression, chronic pain

...Keefer, instructor of plastic surgery at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study appearing in a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology . "When we coat the electrodes with carbon nanotubes, it improves the stimulation of the nerve and the feedback from the sensors." Depending on the way the nanotub...

Sweets make young horses harder to train in Montana State study

... Ace bandages. A commercial mixture of corn, oats, barley and molasses -- sometimes called "sweet grain" or "sweet feed" -- gives horses the glossy coat and lively spirit that makes them attractive to prospective buyers, said Jan Bowman, an animal nutritionist at MSU. But the extra energy provided ...

Sugar study is sweetener for stem cell science

...0,000 funding boost. All cells that make up the tissues of the body such as skin, liver, brain and blood are surrounded by a layer of sugars that coat the cells. These sugars help the cells to know what type of cell they are and to respond to the other cells which surround them and the chemical me...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- July 16, 2008

...lothing that can also provide multiple protection against a wide variety of dangerous microorganisms. The scientists developed a special process to coat Kevlar samples with acyclic N-Halamine, a potent germ-fighting substance. They then exposed coated and uncoated fabric samples to E. coli , Staphylo...

DNA study unlocks mystery to diverse traits in dogs

... possibly be related to a Great Dane? Dogs vary in size, shape, color, coat length and behavior more than any other animal and until now, this variance...needs or desires of their human owners, such as herding or hunting ability, coat color and body and skull shape and size. This resulted in the massive vari...

MIT: Stripes key to nanoparticle drug delivery

...compares the feat to a phenomenon kids can discover. "If you have a soap film and you poke it with a bubble wand, you'll pop it," he said. "But if you coat the bubble wand with soap before poking the film, it will pass through the film without popping it because it's coated with the same material." Stella...

First draft of transgenic papaya genome yields many fruits

...to 35.6 million pounds between 1992 and 1998 as a result of the virus. Using a technique developed in 1986 that involved randomly inserting a viral coat protein gene into a plant to give the plant immunity to the virus, in the early 1990s scientists at Cornell and the University of Hawaii (led by Denni...

Analysis of RNA role in spreading disease advances study of damaging plant infections

...Thats where the problem comes in the plant, Ding said. Viroids resemble viruses, but consist of only small RNA molecules that dont have the protein coat found on viruses and that dont encode any proteins. Viroids so far have been shown to infect only plants. Ding and colleagues introduced mutations ...

How roots find a route

...ition of Science, also explains how germinating seedlings penetrate the soil without pushing themselves out as they burrow. The key is in the fuzzy coat of hairs on the roots of plants says Professor Liam Dolan. We have identified a growth control mechanism that enables these hairs to find their way an...

New decontamination system kills anthrax rapidly without lingering effects

... chlorine dioxide until the gas is neutralized with sodium bisulfite vapor and vented from the building. The new decontamination system resembles a coat rack with radiation modules arranged on rings at various heights that face outward to broadcast radiation throughout a room. Since the X-rays and UV-C...

Penn researchers shine the light of venus to learn how the herpes virus invades cells

...iversity of Pennsylvania researchers have uncovered an important step in how herpes simplex virus, HSV-1, uses cooperating proteins found on its outer coat to gain entry into healthy cells and infect them. Further, the studys authors say, they have demonstrated the effectiveness of monitoring these prote...

NSF awards Stevens team $1 million for research on smart, bacteria-repellent nanohydrogels

...Fs Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT) initiative. "We are making families of different polymer nanoparticles and developing new ways to coat these onto surfaces.?/P> The real challenge is to create so-called differentially adhesive surfaces, ones that will be adhesive to certain types of c...

Fine-tuning lasers to destroy blood-borne diseases like AIDS

...ective. Femtosecond laser pulses, through a process called Impulsive Stimulated Raman Scattering (ISRS), produces lethal vibrations in the protein coat of microorganisms, thereby destroying them. The effect of the vibrations is similar to that of high-pitched noise shattering glass. The physicist...

New field-deployable biosensor detects avian influenza virus in minutes instead of days

...ravels under one sensing channel and one reference channel. Researchers coat the sensing channel with the specific antibodies and coat the reference channel with non-specific antibodies. Having the reference ch...

Society for General Microbiology 161st Meeting, University of Edinburgh

...s and patterns of anaerobic infection. Hospital superbug C. difficile has a coat of armour that can self-assemble even when its taken off the bacterium. The protein coat has a regular shape and joins together itself. This could give scientists a...