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A gene's first 'kiss' sets off that affair known as puberty

Puberty, that awkward phase when boys and girls are primed for their sexual reproductive years as men and women, appears to be triggered by the brain's own version of "It takes two to tango," whereby a signal literally gets turned on by a molecule that is produced by a gene aptly named KiSS-1. The couple ?a biochemical equivalent to Adam and Eve ?makes its sudden appearance in a region of...

Molecular biology fills gaps in knowledge of bat evolution

One in five mammals living on Earth is a bat, yet their evolutionary history is largely unknown because of a limited fossil record and conflicting or incomplete theories about their origins and divergence. Now, a research team including University of California, Riverside Biology Professor Mark Springer, has published a paper in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science that uses molecular...

Quantum Dots Research Leads to New Knowledge about Protein Binding in Plants

UC Riverside researchers from the Departmentsof Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering andBotany and Plant Sciences have worked together to discover a way toutilize to uncover new knowledge about the binding of a protein at the growingpollen tube tip. This protein plays a critic...

Newly Discovered Compound Blocks Known Cancer-Causing Protein

Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center scientists have discovered a potential new drug that inhibits destructive cell signals that drive the growth of one-third of all cancers. The scientists showed they could block the growth of cultured colon cancer cells using this new compound, called cysmethynil. Their finding, reported in the March 22, 2005, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of...

Harnessing microbes, one by one, to build a better nanoworld

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...

Scientists Propose Sweeping Changes to Naming of Bird Neurosystems to Acknowledge Their True Brainpower

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval to Mylan Technologies, Inc., for the first generic version of Alza Corporation's Duragesic Patch (Fentanyl Transdermal System) used to treat patients suffering from severe chronic pain that cannot be managed with alternative analgesics. When applied to the skin, this patch technology delivers fentanyl, an opioid pain medication that is s...

Scientists identify molecule that regulates well-known tumor suppressor

Scientists have discovered that a molecule called DJ-1 is likely to be involved in the generation of human tumors through negative regulation of the well-known tumor suppressor, PTEN. The research, published in the March issue of Cancer Cell, has important implications for determining the prognosis of some human cancers, and may prove to be a suitable target for cancer therapy. The phospha...

NASA study finds snow melt causes large ocean plant blooms

A NASA funded study has found a decline in winter and spring snow cover over Southwest Asia and the Himalayan mountain range is creating conditions for more widespread blooms of ocean plants in the Arabian Sea. The decrease in snow cover has led to greater differences in both temperature and pressure systems between the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Sea. The pressure differences gene...

Cerebral navigation: How do nerve fibers know what direction to grow in?

Nervous system development requires billions of neurons to migrate to the appropriate locations in the brain and grow nerve fibers (axons) that connect to other nerve cells in an intricate network. Growth cones, structures in the tips of growing axons, are responsible for steering axons in the right direction, guided by a complex set of signals from cells they encounter along the way. Some signal...

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are now species of slime-mold beetles -- but strictly in homage

Drinking water during a long-distance race may do serious harm rather than keep you safe from injury if you're drinking too much, according to a cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Runners or any long-distance athletes who drink too much water during a race could put themselves at jeopardy for developing hyponatremia, a condition marked by a loss in the body's sodium content th...

Butterfly migration could be largest known

Millions of painted lady butterflies that fluttered into California's Central Valley in the last week of March could be just the advance guard of one of the largest migrations of the species on record, said Arthur Shapiro, a professor and expert on butterflies at UC Davis. Shapiro said he is getting reports of "bill...

Study: Well-known protein helps stem cells become secretory cells

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that a single protein regulates secretion levels in the fruit fly's salivary gland and its skin-like outer layer. Th...

Mechanism for the captation of nutrients in plants- unknown to date

This finding, carried by the latest issue of the Japanese journal, Plant Cell Physiology, will enable the design of experiments aimed at enhancing vegetable species in the interest of humanity. Researchers at the Institute have shown that, in the presence of saccharose (a substance produced in leaves to be subsequently distributed around the plant), the cells of the reserve organs - such a...

Study casts doubt on 'Snowball Earth' theory

Remains of photosynthesizing microbes in prehistoric rocks suggest Earth was not ice-bound The study appears in the Sept. 29 Science Express. The lead author is Alison Olcott, a Ph.D. student of earth...

Nanowires can detect molecular signs of cancer, scientists find

Use of minuscule devices to spot cancer markers could lead to ultra-powerful new diagnostics Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires -- even when these cancer markers constitute only one hundred-billionth of the protein present in a drop of bl...

Team of international scientists departs today to discover the unknown in China's Himalayan region

In the quest to discover new species, a team of international scientists leaves today on a month-long expedition to explore the undiscovered treasures in the Mountains of Southwest China, an extension of the great Himalayan mountain range. "Expedition Everest: Mission Himalayas" is a scientific and cultural journey to explore one of the planet's richest and most biologically diverse regio...

Researchers find Amchitka seafood safe for now

An independent consortium of university-based environmental scientists announced today the results from three 2004 expeditions to Amchitka Island in the western Aleutians to assess radionuclides in that marine environment. Three nuclear test shots were set off under Amchitka by the U.S. Government during a six-year period beginning in 1965. The study can be found at www.cresp.org Seafood S...

Researchers know what you were about to say; fMRI used to detect memory storage and retrieval

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have provided evidence that the act of recalling a memory is a bit like mental time travel. Their study, presented in the Dec. 23 edition of the journal Science, demonstrates that the same areas of the brain that are active during an event are activated when a person attem...

How Fruitflies Know It's Time for Lunch

To control what you eat and when, your nervous system must coordinate a laundry list of signals: internal signals contain information about energy level, food preferences, and metabolic need, while external signals relay information about the quality of available food, determined by its smell and taste. Scientists studying the fruitfly Drosophila have traced the path of olfactory signals b...

Worms know bad food when they smell it

For most people, just a whiff of food that has made them sick in the past is enough to trigger a wave of nausea ?and to prevent them from eating that food again. It's a response that's instantaneous, involuntary, and so fundamental to basic biology that it occurs in a broad range of species. Even worms, researchers have now shown, quickly learn to avoid smells associated with foods that have made...

Scientist measures role of science's coolest player: The snow

What would the Earth be like if one fine day all the snow melted away? Obviously, it would be a much warmer place. But what's interesting is how much warmer, says Stephen Vavrus, an associate scientist at the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Working with computer-generated simulations, Vavrus found that in the absence of snow cover, global temperatures w...

Interactive 3-D atlas of mouse brain now available on web

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have just launched a web-based 3-D digital atlas browser and database of the brain of a popular laboratory mouse (see "Neuroscientists around the world can now download these extremely accurate anatomical templates and use them to map ot...

Penguins okay with human visitors?for now

A study published in the latest issue of Conservation Biology examines the effects of humans on Magellanic Penguins and finds no immediate, negative effects of tourism. Although first seeing people is stressful for the penguins, habituation is rapid. The authors monitored the defensive head turns and the level of a hormone secreted in response to stress (plasma corticosterone) of penguin...

How does the brain know what the right hand is doing?

A new experiment has shed more light on the multi-decade debate about how the brain knows where limbs are without looking at them. (1) the outflow hypothesis says that the brain monitors signals it sends to the m...

Lactic acid not athlete's poison, but an energy source - if you know how to use it

In the lore of marathoners and extreme athletes, lactic acid is poison, a waste product that builds up in the muscles and leads to muscle fatigue, reduced performance and pain. Coaches and athletes don't realize it, says exercise physiologist George...

Patients now surviving once-fatal immune disease

Individuals who have a rare genetic immune system disorder that prevents them from making antibodies nevertheless appear to be moderately healthy and lead productive lives, according to results of a study by investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. A report on this study appears in the current online edition of Clinical Immunology. The study of 41 adults with X-linked agamm...

Scientists develop a way to make the deadliest toxin known even more toxic

According to the study, the molecules bind to specific sites on the neurotoxin protein, increasing protease activity and enhancing the toxin's effect. In some cases, the study noted, the activation power of the new molecules was as much as fourteen-fold, the greatest increase in activation ever reported for a protease; before this study, a two-fold activation of a protease was referred to as a st...

Researchers now able to look deep into heart to view triggers of a heart's beat

Scientists have long known that the social insects in the order Hymenoptera--which includes ants, bees, and wasps--have an unusual mechanism for sex determination: Unfertilized eggs develop into males, while fertilized eggs become females. But the development of an unfertilized egg into an adult (called parthenogenesis) remains a mysterious process. One mystery has been the origin of the...

Does father know best?

A study forthcoming in the June 2006 issue of Current Anthropology sheds new light a contentious issue: How accurate are men's suspicions of whether or not they are a child's biological father? Some studies have suggested that up to 10 percent of fathers are not the biological parents of their alleged child, but little is known about how this differs across cultures and to what extent men's pate...

Scientists re-engineer a well-known antibiotic to counter drug resistance

The scientists replaced a single atom from the molecular structure of vancomycin aglycon, a glycopeptide antibiotic that attacks the bacteria by inhibiting cell wall synthesis, significantly increasing the drug's spectrum of activity. In recent years, a number of the most common strains of enterococci have become resistant to vancomycin and use of the antibiotic has been under scrutiny. This re-e...

Little known DNA repair enzyme may be a tumor suppressor gene

Use of the amino acid supplement L-arginine following a heart attack does not improve certain cardiac functions and measurements and may be associated with an increased risk of death, according to a study in the January 4 issue of JAMA. L-arginine is a widely available dietary supplement and is publicized as having benefits for patients with hypertension, angina, heart failure and sexual d...

Knowledge of infection may prevent spread of herpes virus

A new study suggests that the risk of transmitting the virus that causes most cases of genital herpes could be cut in half by more testing and informing sexual partners of infection. The study is published in the July 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Until recently, there was little evidence to show that knowledge of infection would lead to decreased tra...

One-third of adults with diabetes still don't know they have it

The prevalence of diagnosed diabetes in U.S. adults age 20 and older has risen from about 5.1 percent to 6.5 percent, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who analyzed national survey data from two periods--1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2002. However, the percentage of adults with undiagnosed diabetes did not cha...

Nanowire arrays can detect signals along individual neurons

Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons. "We d...

Can you hear me now? Scientists find previously unknown receptors on adult stem cells

For many years, researchers believed that stem cells in the bone marrow spent most of their existence in a slumber-like state, unaware of -- and unaffected by -- the daily battles fought by the body's immune system. Scientists at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation have discovered that marrow stem cells -- undifferentiated cells that eventually give rise to the blood c...

Encoded metallic nanowires reveal bioweapons

When dangerous infectious diseases or biological weapons are suspected, fast help is required. The first step is a reliable, sensitive, and unambiguous, yet also fast and simple, identification of the pathogen; preferably, this test should be carried out on the spot, not in a laboratory. Portable miniature biodetection systems that can detect multiple pathogens simultaneously would be ideal for t...

MatBase -- A new transcription factor knowledge base released by Genomatix

Genomatix Software GmbH, a pioneer and leader in the analysis of eukaryotic transcriptional regulation, releases MatBase, a knowledge base of transcription factors (TF). It contains genomic TF binding sites and protein binding domains, related literature, more than 27.000 known TF ?gene interactions, experimentally verified complexes with other TFs (promoter modules), and weight matrix de...

Polynesia explorers created worldwide web of scientific knowledge

Scientific travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries led waves of daring expeditions into Polynesia, netting oceans of discoveries about its geography, flora and fauna and people. But they were more than simply courageous collectors of artifacts and statistics, says the author of a new book. These seafaring naturalists were the producers and mediators of a new "global network of scientific...

Knowledge of dendritic cells branches out

A new type of cell that generates crucial cells of the immune system has been discovered at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. With this new knowledge, medical researchers can begin to consider the development of customized immune therapies using this new cell to target specific infections such as HIV, malaria and influenza;certain cancers; and even autoimmune diseases. Dendritic cells (...

A giant among minnows: Giant danio can keep growing

Two fish that share much in common genetically appear to have markedly different abilities to grow, a finding that could provide a new way to research such disparate areas as muscle wasting disease and fish farming, a new study shows. The study in the November issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, finds that the giant danio, unlike...