Sugar-coated sea urchin eggs could have sweet implications for human fertility
...Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories shows that common assumptions about sea urchin reproduction don't hold true for all species of the invertebrate creature. The work could lead to better understanding of fertilization among mammals, including the potential to solve some baffling human reproductive prob...Images of 'tail' of protein needed for cell multiplication suggest anticancer drug targets
...udy also shows that a slight change in a structure common among many enzymes performing similar jobs can create a new enzyme with a unique activity. The St. Jude researchers report that the stabilizing influence of Ubc12's protein tail is based on its ability to nestle within a groove of the larger molecul...Case for IBD combination therapy comes from research at Baylor, MIT and Hebrew University
... reuteri is the only known commensal Lactobacillus common to mice and humans, and thus represents a probiotic model organism. L. reuteri clones with cytokine-inhibitory activity may have anti-inflammatory effects in the intestine, they reasoned. So they investigated the probiotic activities of TNF- inhibit...New treatment for fibromyalgia
...ng musculoskeletal disorder. Nearly six times more common in women than in men, fibromyalgia is marked by widespread body pain and muscle tenderness, often accompanied by headaches, sleep disturbances, and fatigue. While its cause remains a mystery, fibromyalgia has been linked to abnormalities in the brain...Charting the future in prostate cancer care: A call to action
...crease in incidence, in addition to being the most common non-skin cancer in the U.S. In fact, over the next decade, the number of new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. is expected to increase by 50 percent to more than 300,000 new cases per year. Unfortunately, even today, prostate cancer treatment and re...Joslin Diabetes Center adds first affiliate in California at Irvine Medical Center
...iseases, as well as stave off heart damage that is common among diabetes patients. "Over 1.5 million people in California have diabetes, and statistically, a third of them don't know they have the disease," said Dr. John W. Hare, director of Joslin's Affiliated Centers Program. "We look forward to working...OutFoxed! New research may redefine late-stage cardiac development
... about one percent of live births and are the most common malformations in newborns. A team of University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers, led by Edward E. Morrisey, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, have been investigating how the heart develops from its earliest stages of development t...Breaking new ground in germ cell guidance
...sult of a shared uptake and dephosphorylation of a common substrate necessary for the survival of germ cells. In this model, too much Wun or Wun2 in somatic cells would deprive germ cells of the survival signal, causing them to die; too little Wun2 in the germ cells themselves would have the same effect. Th...Wrapping a memory with an experience, capacity for recollection detected in non-human species
...avior. Initially, the rats explored a "list" of 10 common household odors (for example, cinnamon, oregano, coffee, chocolate), each mixed in ordinary sand that hid a buried food reward. Following a 30-minute retention period, they were presented with a series of 20 odors, the 10 "old" odors plus 10 "new" ...Adaptive changes in the genome may provide insight into the genetics of complex disease
... differencesevery 1,000 base pairs or so. The most common form of these differences is"single nucleotide polymorphisms," or SNPs (pronounced 'snips'). Occasionally, new SNPs arise that allow certain individuals in a populationto be healthier and produce more offspring, and these variants become morefrequent...New research suggests link between maternal diet and childhood leukemia risk
... of having a child who develops leukemia, the most common childhood cancer in the United States. "This is the first time researchers have conducted a systematic survey of a woman's diet and linked it to the risk of childhood leukemia," said Dr. Kenneth Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmen...Screen siblings, parents of infants with severe heart abnormalities
...n increase because data do not exist that show how common they are in the general population. "For many of those individuals, the problems are medically significant and need to be followed up by a cardiologist," he said. "Before, we would have completely ignored these people. Now we know they n...Pneumococcal vaccine reduces ear infections, pneumonia, new study shows
... Ear infections (otitis media) and pneumonia are common infections in children; there are more than seven million cases of ear infection and more than one half million cases of pneumonia each year. Poehling and colleagues studied data from Tennessee's Medicaid records and from three commercial insurance ...Common cold virus can cause polio in mice when injected into muscles
...ave discovered that, under the right conditions, a common cold virus closely related to poliovirus can cause polio in mice. The researchers injected a cold virus called Coxsackievirus A21 into mice that were engineered to be susceptible to this particular virus. However, instead of developing a cold, the mi...Genetic map of important tree genes outlined
... found that nearly all the genes were functionally common between the two, even though they have been separated by about 100 million years of evolution and look completely different. Arabidopsis is the most frequently used plant in the world for basic genetic research on plant structure and function, and be...Natural mineral locks up carbon dioxide
A common mineral can remove carbon dioxide from combustion gases, but in its natural state, it is glacially slow. Now, a team of Penn State researchers is changing serpentine so that it sequesters the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning in hours, not eons...Genuine stem cells found in skin might treat hair loss, wounds
...new insights into the underlying genetic signature common to all stem cells, said the researchers. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells whose daughters give rise to the specialized cell types that make up an organism. Embryonic stem cells, which emerge in the first days of an embryo's development, have the......Galapagos finches had most likely descended from a common ancestor, they had developed into distinct species based on differences in their beaks-differences which corresponded with their confinement to different islands in the archipelago and their adaptation to different ecological niches. Today, beak shap...Rare deficit maps thinking circuitry
...laws may translate into cognitive symptoms in more common and complex major mental disorders. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Karen Berman, M.D., and colleagues, traced the thinking deficit to a circuit at the back of the brain that processes locations of objects in the visual field. The researchers report ...Essential smell gene may provide key to new insect repellents
...because -- unlike other insects -- fruit flies are common laboratory organisms with well-understood genetics. The researchers wanted to know whether Or83b worked independently, like other odorant receptors, to sense a specific chemical, or played another more general role in the sense of smell. If Or83b rec...