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Genes In The Interferon System Important In Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Two genes with very strong associations withthe disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) have been identified bya team of scientists headed by researchers at the Department of MedicalSciences at Uppsala University. The findings are being published todayon the Web page of the highly prestigious American Journal of HumanGenetics. "These findings are probably the first genetic pieces of ahug...

University of Manchester makes made-to-measure skin and bones a reality using inkjet printers

Made-to-measure skin and bones, which couldbe used to treat burn victims or patients who have suffered severedisfigurements, may soon be a reality using inkjets which can printhuman cells.Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed thebreakthrough technology which will allow tailor-made tissues and bonesto be grown, simply by inputting their dimensions into a computer....

Lack of enzyme turns fat cells into fat burners

Lack of the enzyme, acetyl CoA carboxylase 2or ACC2, appears to turn the adipose or fat cells of mice into fatburners, explaining in part why the animals can eat more and weigh lessthan their normal counterparts, said Baylor College of Medicineresearchers.The report that appears online today in the Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences. "Westudied the fat cells in these mic...

Computers to be used to find blueprint for new influenza drug

Researchers at the University of Bath have won a £261,000 grant to use the latest software to produce a blueprint of a designer drug that could stop influenza and some other diseases from replicating in humans. Professor Ian...

Fundamental Finding Yields Insight into Stem Cells, Cancer; Opens Door to Drug Discovery

Few things about growing older are asinevitable and obvious as “going gray,?yet scientists have been unableto explain the precise cause of this usually unwelcome transformation.In a report posted today on the Web site of the journal Science,researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s HospitalBoston say they have found the cellular cause of graying hair whileinvestigating th...

New Study from Affymetrix Laboratories Points to Changing View of How Genome Works

Scientists at Affymetrix, Inc. (Nasdaq: AFFX) reported today in Science magazine online that they have completed a high-resolution scan of structure and function for nearly 30 percent of the human genome sequence. In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the research team used high-density GeneChip(R) microarrays to study every fifth base, on average, of 10 human chromosomes; they fou...

UCSD researchers maintain stem cells without contaminated animal feeder layers

The growth and maintenance of human embryonic stem cells in the absence of contaminated animal products has been demonstrated by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine researchers in the Whittier Institute, La Jolla, California. Published in the April 2005 issue of the journal Stem Cells, the study shows that laboratory culture media enriched by a human protein calle...

Transport System Smuggles Medicines Into Brain

Parrots, long a favorite pet animal, are attractive to owners because of their vibrant colors. But those colors may mean more to parrots than what meets the eye. For more than a century, biochemists have known that parrots use an unusual set of pigments to produce their rainbow of plumage colors, but their biochemical identity has remained elusive. Now, an Arizona State University researc...

Highly adaptable genome in gut bacterium key to intestinal health

A bacterium that lives in the human gut adaptively shifts more than a quarter of its genes into high gear when its host's diet changes from sugar to complex carbohydrates. This adaptive mechanism not only allows the bacterial species to survive rapidly changing nutrient conditions but also helps maintain the functions and stability of the gut's highly complex microbial society, according...

Scientists identify genetic pathways essential to RNA interference

A research team based at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified 80 new genes essential to the process of RNA interference (RNAi), a powerful new research tool for inactivating genes in plants or animals. They used the RNAi process itself to find new genes that participate in the gene-silencing mechanism, which someday may help to fight human disease. The report will appear in the jou...

Ants Genetic Engineering Leads To Species Interdependency

Findings reported last week reveal how anevolutionary innovation involving the sharing of genes between two antspecies has given rise to a deep-seated dependency between them for thesurvival of both species populations.The new work illustrates how genetic exchange through interbreedingbetween two species can give rise to a system of interdependence at ahigh level of biological organization...

Introduced foxes transformed vegetation on Aleutian Islands from lush grasslands to tundra

Huge colonies of seabirds accustomed to nesting on islands free of predators began disappearing when fur traders started introducing foxes onto islands in the Aleutian archipelago in the 18th century. The ground-nesting birds made easy meals for the foxes. A study published this week in the journal Science now shows that the effects of the introduced foxes rippled through entire island ecosystems...

MSI releases 'moleculizer' - a new approach to simulation of intracellular biochemical networks

Dr. Roger Brent, President and Director of Research at the the release of a new approach to simulation of intracellularbiochemical networks in the January 2005 edition of NatureBiotechnology.The research article, entit...

UCLA scientists transform HIV into cancer-seeking missile

Camouflaging an impotent AIDS virus in new clothes enables it to hunt down metastasized melanoma cells in living mice, reports a UCLA AIDS Institute study in the Feb. 13 online edition of Nature Medicine. The scientists added the protein that makes fireflies glow to the virus in order to track its journey from the bloodstream to new tumors in the animals' lungs. "For the past 20 years, ge...

New insight into people who 'see' colors in letters and numbers

People with a form of synesthesia in which they see colors when viewing letters and numbers really do see colors, researchers, led by Edward M. Hubbard of the University of California San Diego, have found. What's more, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains reveals that they show activation of color-perception areas. The researchers said their findings lend support t...

International trial of two microbicides begins

A large, multisite trial designed to examine the safety and preliminary effectiveness of two candidate topical microbicides to prevent HIV infection has opened to volunteer enrollment. The trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, represents a partnership among various research institutions in Africa and the U...

Examination of internal 'wiring' of yeast, worm, and fly reveals conserved circuits

First-of-its-kind analysis published in the Feb. 8 PNAS supports the concept of a basic wiring diagram for all eukaryotes. Researchers in California, Israel, and Germany have compared three distantly related species ?baker's yeast, a worm, and the fruit fly ?and reported that protein "wiring" connections in one species are often conserved in all three. This first-of-its-kind analysis of t...

Applied Biosystems Introduces Advanced Gene Expression Service Provider Program

Applied Biosystems (NYSE:ABI), an Applera Corporation business, today announced the introduction of the Applied Biosystems Advanced Gene Expression Service Provider Program, a new program for service providers who are interested in accessing Applied Biosystems comprehensive solution for gene expression analysis, including the highly sensitive Expression Array System for whole genome analysis and...

International HapMap consortium expands mapping effort

The International HapMap Consortium, boosted by an additional $3.3 million in public-private support, today announced plans to create an even more powerful map of human genetic variation than originally envisioned. The map will accelerate the discovery of genes related to common diseases, such as asthma, cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the project was launched in October 2002, th...

New Insights Into HIV Immunity Suggest Alternative Approach to Vaccines

New insights by Duke University Medical Center researchers as to how HIV evades the human immune system may offer a new approach for developing HIV vaccines. The findings suggest some HIV vaccines may have failed because they induce a class of antibodies that a patient's own immune system is programmed to destroy. The Duke team discovered that certain broadly protective antibodies, which...

Programmable cells: Engineer turns bacteria into living computers

In a step toward making living cells function as if they were tiny computers, engineers at Princeton have programmed bacteria to communicate with each other and p...

Gene Signatures Predict Interferon Response For Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Multiple sclerosis (MS) can be an unpredictable disease. It develops when the body's immune system attacks healthy nerve cells and disrupts normal nerve signaling. Patients experience a wide range of symptoms—including tingling, paralysis, pain, fatigue, and blurred vision—that can appear independently or in combination, sporadically or persistently. Although symptoms appear in no particular orde...

Insight into natural cholesterol control suggests novel cholesterol-lowering therapy

New work reported in the March issue of Cell Metabolism has provided insight into a key mechanism by which cells limit cholesterol synthesis. The finding suggests a novel approach to the development of cholesterol-lowering drugs that may boost the effect of statins, one of the most prescribed cholesterol inhibitors, according to researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.<...

New winter hulless barley has high protein

Virginia Tech's Small Grains Breeding Program is developing a new type of barley that lacks the fibrous covering. This new hulless barley offers producers an alternative grain for both traditional and new markets, including food, feed, and ethanol. The price for winter barley has declined since 1996. Even though winter barley was an integral component of the region's cropping system, growe...

Gray wolves maintain the food chain in winter

Climate change has already had dramatic effects on individual species, with disruptions in range, reproductive success, and seasonal phenomena like migration. But, in a new study from the open-access online journal PLoS Biology (www.plosbiology.org), Christopher Wilmers and Wayne Getz show that the impact of climate change on many different species in Yellowstone Park can be buffered by a top pre...

New insight into regulation of blood stem cells

Scientists have made a significant advance toward understanding the regulation of blood stem cells and the complex, lifelong process of blood cell formation. A research study published in the February issue of Developmental Cell expands on previous studies by using adult animals to examine the role of a key gene known to be required for blood cell formation. Information gained from this research...

Navigating an integrated yeast network

Scientists have for the first time mapped multiple complex biological interactions in a yeast cell in a simple graphical form, enhancing our understanding of how the networks of interaction by which components of a cell influence one another. New research published in the Open Access journal Journal of Biology shows that such maps can also reveal cryptic interactions and enable accurate predictio...

Solutions that reduce death of marine life reeled in by International Smart Gear Competition

As the world prepared to observe Earth Day, World Wildlife Fund and its partners in the International Smart Gear Competition announced three new winning solutions to prevent the accidental maiming and killing of marine mammals, juvenile fish, and sea turtles that become ensnared by fishing nets and longlines--a problem known as bycatch--while also improving the efficiency of commercial fishing.</...

Silence the gene, save the cell: RNA interference as promising therapy for ALS

Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have used RNA interference in transgenic mice to silence a mutated gene that causes inherited cases of amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), substantially delaying both the onset and the progression rate of the fatal motor neuron disease. Their results will be published in the April issue of Nature Medicine, and in the...

Scientists identify genetic pathways essential to RNA interference

A research team based at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified 80 new genes essential to the process of RNA interference (RNAi), a powerful new research tool for inactivating genes in plants or animals. They used the RNAi process itself to find new genes that participate in the gene-silencing mechanism, which someday may help to fight human disease. The report will appear in the jou...

Canadian youth 4th highest in international obesity study

Canadian youth rank fourth-highest on the obesity scale in a new international study of adolescents from 34 countries, says co-author Dr. Ian Janssen, a professor in Queen's University's School of Physical & Health Education and Department of Community Health & Epidemiology. And sedentary behaviour ?like watching television ?was strongly correlated with being overweight, he adds.</...

Youth With HIV Take More Risks After New Meds Introduced

Teens with HIV are having more risky sex with more partners than their counterparts did in the years before powerful new medications for HIV were introduced in 1996, according to a new report in the American Journal of Health Behavior. A group of HIV-positive youth studied between 1999 and 2000 reported having more sexual partners, more unprotected sex and more drug use than HIV-positive...

Study reveals new technique for fingerprinting environmental samples

Groundbreaking research led by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) demonstrates for the first time that the signatures of the genes alone in terrestrial and aquatic samples can accurately diagnose the health of the sampled environments. This study, published in the April 22nd edition of the journal Science positions large-scale genome sequencing to accelerate advances i...

First North American Encapsulated Islet Transplant without Long-term Immune Suppression into a Patient with Type 1 Diabetes

Biologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered how the plagues of the Middle Ages have made around 10% of Europeans resistant to HIV. Scientists have known for some time that these individuals carry a genetic mutation (known as CCR5-delta32) that prevents the virus from entering the cells of the immune system but have been unable to account for the high levels of the gene in Scandinavi...

Used in a new way, RNA interference permanently silences key breast cancer gene

In laboratory mouse experiments, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have developed a way to use RNA interference (RNAi) so that it permanently hampers breast cancer development. The technique permanently silences activated STAT3, a crucial gene found in some human breast tumors, thus reducing the cancer's ability to become invasive. The study, presented at...

NIH Researchers Discover How Insulin Allows Entry of Glucose Into Cells

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered the critical sequence of events by which insulin stimulates the entry of glucose into fat cells. The study, appearing in the May 9 Journal of Cell Biology, was conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases....

Insight into DNA's 'weakest links' may yield clues to cancer biology

The chromosomes of mammals, including humans, contain regions that are particularly prone to breaking under conditions of stress and in cancer. Now, new research by geneticists at Duke University Medical Center finds that yeast cells also contain such weak links in DNA and begins to reveal the molecular characteristics of these links that might help to explain them. The findings, publishe...

Turning viruses into allies against cancer

To most, the mere mention of the word "virus" stirs up memories of pain, fever and varying levels of suffering. But in recent years, scientists have been trying to turn these long-time medical foes into allies in the fight against cancer. Through genetic engineering, viruses are being re-programmed to take advantage of their natural abilities to infiltrate, commandeer, replicate and destro...

Integration of Agilent's MS technology, Proteome Systems' software to help scientists in proteomics research

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) and Proteome Systems, a leading international proteomics company, today announced they have signed a marketing agreement to collaborate on an integrated solution for the analysis of glycoproteins, molecules that are important in the study of many diseases, including cancer, influenza and arthritis. Under the agreement, Proteome Systems will make its GlycomIQ so...

Virus-host interactions at sea effect global photosynthesis

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that it has for the first time released the chip design, probe sequence and annotation information for all of its microarrays. The release of this information is expected to improve cross-laboratory experimental research and cross-platform data comparison. "Full release of the probe sequences is an admirable and responsible position for A...