Looking for the genes that affect a person's level of response to alcohol
...hich changes their reaction per drink, their liver gets a little slower in metabolizing alcohol, their brain gets a little more sensitive to alcohol, and when they get sick, they take medications, all of which affe...Recycled or revamped therapeutics find novel anti-cancer applications
...ntain the energy demands of growth. If one pathway gets shut down due, say, to a molecular targeting drug, the cell compensates with the alternate pathway for continued function. In cancer cells, however, the malignancy is often coupled with the 'addiction' of the cell to one of the two molecular governin...Genealogy of scaly reptiles rewritten by new research
... few years before the general scientific community gets used to the new tree," Vidal says. "If other research groups working in this area find the same pattern with additional genes, then I believe the scientific community may accept these results more quickly."...Normal chromosome ends elicit a limited DNA damage response
... window right after DNA replication, when the cell gets ready for cell division, chromosome ends are expos...of DNA, they hypothesize, the repair process never gets fully underway at telomeres. Instead, the very tips of the chromosomes are looped back, tucked in an...Grabbing addiction by the tail
...ing on it instead of the receptor's tail. "Once it gets inside the neuron, the peptide competes with the receptor for binding to the machinery," Wang explained. With the cellular machinery otherwise occupied, the glutamate receptors stay on the cell surface, where they continue to receive signals. After ...Obesity before pregnancy linked to childhood weight problems
...ildhood obesity needs to begin before a woman ever gets pregnant." Salsberry conducted the study with Patricia Reagan, a professor of economics at Ohio State. Their study appears in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics. The researchers analyzed the data for 3,022 children included in the National ...UF scientists find sugar may have a sour side
...n just the common concept that the reason a person gets fat is because they eat too many calories and they don't do enough exercise," said Richard J. Johnson, M.D., the J. Robert Cade professor of nephrology and chief of nephrology, hypertension and transplantation at UF's College of Medicine. "And althou...Mercury in atmosphere could be washed out more easily than earlier believed
...is passed up the food chain. "By the time mercury gets to the top of the food chain, it can increase by a factor of a million," he said. "It can go from being nearly undetectable in the air to being toxic to larger organisms." Swartzendruber presents his team's findings Thursday during the American Geop...Chlamydia parasite lives off our fat
... with three million new cases a year. Chlamydia gets around because it knows its hosts so well. It's an "obligate intracellular parasite" which means that it relies on its eukaryotic host for everything from reproduction to synthesizing ATP, all while living inside a membrane-bounded vacuole that provi...Key brain antioxidant linked to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
...directly, and it's never been clear exactly how it gets there," says Swanson, who is also professor and vi...ence that EAAC1 is the mechanism by which cysteine gets into neurons and that transporting cysteine is probably its chief function." Study findings are cur...Engineered stem cells show promise for sneaking drugs into the brain
...minal (striatum)," Svendsen says. "The bonus is it gets transported back to the substantia niagra." The transplanted cells, according to Behrstock, survived and continued to produce GDNF in laboratory animals for up to three months. One hurdle that needs to be overcome before such a technique could be att...Infectious agent thwarts typical defense mechanisms; Sheds light on immune system function
... fully detected by the immune system only after it gets inside a monocyte, an immune cell whose job is to detect pathogens when they enter the body. Most pathogens are detected by sensors on the surface of monocytes, and these cells immediately respond by launching an attack. However, monocytes don't imme...Light-sensing cells in retina develop before vision
...esponse but then quickly stop firing when the area gets dark. A third cell type is slow to turn on when exposed to light and takes its time shutting down in darkness. In addition, the cells tend to react to light in groups. Electrically, some of the cells work almost like a chorus, sending several synchr...Gene therapy for muscular dystrophy fixes frail muscle cells in animal model, Stanford study finds
...two advantages: one is that in her method the gene gets inserted directly into the cell's own DNA, which is why the correction is permanent. In some other methods the gene stays outside the DNA and slowly breaks down. The second advantage is that her method doesn't rely on a virus to disperse the DNA and ......sses that flourished in the wet weather. "When it gets green, they begin to eat grass," Cerling says. "When it's not, they eat trees and shrubs." The seventh elephant the bull named Lewis was different. Cerling had isotope data from Lewis' tail hair from 2000 through February 2002, when the hair was r...Scientists identify molecular structure of key viral protein
...logy, who co-led the study. "Knowing how the virus gets into the cell will allow us to better inhibit this key part of the viral life cycle." Tens of thousands of different proteins are at work in the human body, each folded into a very specific shape to do its job properly. Most proteins have just one s...JCI table of contents: January 4, 2006
...NG COMMENTARY: TITLE : Gene expression profiling gets to the root of human hair follicle stem cells AUTHOR CONTACT: George Cotsarelis University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USAPhone: 610-902-2400; Fax: 215-573-9102; E-mail: c otsarel@mail.med.upenn.edu .View the PD...First demonstration of 'teaching' in non-human animals
...ual feedback between them: if the gap between them gets too large, the leader decelerates and the follower accelerates, and if the gap between them gets too small, the leader accelerates and the follower decelerates. It is as if the leader is towing the...Chronic oil pollution takes toll on seabirds along South American coast
...l in the water. She likened a healthy penguin that gets lightly oiled to a diver in a wet suit with just a few holes there's not much difficulty and the swimmer can keep going. But heavy oil ruins the bird's insulation, like a wet suit with lots of holes, and the swimmer wants to get out of the water imm...... of the laser light is scattered, but a small part gets absorbed by the fossil. Schopf is the first scientist to use this technique to analyze ancient microscopic fossils. He discovered that the composition of the fossils changed; nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur were removed, leaving carbon and hydrogen. Conf...