Immune cells' genetic 'jam session' is controlled by cell division machinery
...active recombination, but whether its decline just happened to coincide with the beginning of DNA copying or whether the two processes were somehow linked was unclear," he says. "Now we have the first biochemical evidence that it's no mere coincidence." The evidence was uncovered in experiments by Hao Jiang, ...'Jumping genes' contribute to the uniqueness of individual brains
...M. Carolina N. Marchetto, "because then we knew it happened in vivo and couldn't be dismissed as a tissue culture artifact." Transposable L1 elements, or "jumping genes" as they are often called, make up 17 percent of our genomic DNA but very little is known about them. Almost all of them are marooned at a pe...Self-correcting embryos could be an ethically acceptable source of embryonic stem cells
...s was not clear, Dr Munn believed that it probably happened when a trisomic embryo (one with three of a particular chromosome instead of the usual two) lost the third chromosome somewhere between the time that the fertilised egg first started to divide and the blastocyst stage. "However, not all the embryos w...Did humans cause ecosystem collapse in ancient Australia?
... in the vegetation is the best fit to explain what happened at that critical juncture."...Why do aneurysms form? New studies suggest leading role for white blood cells
...breaks down blood vessel tissue, then studied what happened in the rodents that had altered neutrophil systems and in comparison rodents that were normal. In both cases, says senior author and U-M vascular surgeon Gilbert Upchurch, M.D., the rodents that had low neutrophil levels or no neutrophil-attaching p...Ferry-linked water monitoring system becomes new model for United States
...olicymakers and scientists informed about what has happened in Pamlico Sound following the recent increase in hurricanes." Hurricanes Floyd, Dennis and Irene in 1999 stimulated the state's interest in supporting the research, although Ramus and he began planning the system three years before that, Paerl said....Scientists discover stem cell origin of neck and shoulders
...ime the research team have been able to trace what happened to a major shoulder bone that features in many extinct land animals. They found that it appears to survive in modern vertebrates as the scapular spine. Dr Koentges commented, "Now that we have identified these key players in forming the neck and the ...Major new UNC-based drinking water study suggests pregnancy fears may be overstated
...er use such as drinking and bathing and what later happened with their pregnancies and births. Among tests the women underwent were ultrasound examinations to collect more detailed information about their pregnancies. Researchers then, after adjusting for such factors as age, education, alcohol use and prior ......her frequency than it actually was. The same thing happened in reverse; if a stimulus was given for only 250 milliseconds, the monkeys thought it was vibrating at a lower frequency. The effect was stronger for the shortened stimulus than for the lengthened stimulus, Romo noted. Based on this experiment, it se...Scientific societies support teaching evolution
...sfaction of the scientific community. This has not happened with creationism either with or without its new label "intelligent design." President Bush, by suggesting that we use intelligent design as a scientific counterpoint to the teaching of evolutionary biology, is unwittingly undermining the scientific m...Bird samples from Mongolia confirmed as H5N1 avian flu
.... Whereas prior outbreaks in wild birds have happened either in close proximity to infected domestic poultry and waterfowl, or in regions where such contact could not be excluded, Mongolia's paucity of domestic poultry suggests a new vector of avian flu. Finding the H5N1 strain during this expedition su...A double punch for female survival
...es. Until a few years ago, scientists thought this happened almost uniquely at the level of genes. So it's exciting to find an entirely new mechanism that evolved to let cells take control at the level of RNA. No one knows how widely this type of back-up mechanism is used. We're now investigating some other c...Researchers discover gene connected to rare muscle disease
...." The second part of their study was to see what happened in two groups of mice: one without the Srpk3 protein, and one with too much. In both cases, the muscles were defective. Most of the group without Srpk3 showed the same defect as people with centronuclear myopathy the nuclei of their muscle cells we...University of Chicago researchers find human brain still evolving
...y to many copies. That implies that this must have happened because of positive selection," Lahn said, pointing out that it's statistically unlikely for a haplogroup this young to have such high frequency due merely to random genetic drift. The team also observed geographic differences. For haplogroup D of AS...Scientists get first glimpse at how plants, most animals repair UV-damaged DNA
...maged DNA but nobody could prove it. The reaction happened too fast to be seen with normal laboratory tools. Scientists also knew that the enzyme formed a tiny water-filled pocket to host the damage site within a cell nucleus, said Zhong. But until his latest series of experiments, nobody knew how water affe......d genetic diversity of North Atlantic right whales happened recently, possibly due to whaling, not because the whale population was small even before whaling." Whale louse populations correlate with population sizes of right whales, so if North Atlantic right whales had small populations before whaling, the...Cellular dumping site is not garbage after all
...cientists as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To see what happened if the cellular machinery didn't work right, the r... that switching from making one protein to another happened solely by blocking the assembly of the protein-making machinery. Coller and Parker's Cell paper show...Duke scientists explain gaps in nutrient availability within North Atlantic
... to the subtropical North Atlantic," she said. "We happened to have a lot of available data there to test our ideas. That's why we have focused there. "But what we want to do next is start looking at other ocean basins to get a broader view. We may not get the same patterns in other gyres, because the mode wa...CU's Torres discusses avian flu and policy
...illed more than 20 million people. "One thing that happened in the so-called Spanish flu was a high mortality rate among the healthiest individuals," he says. "The healthier they were, the more susceptible they were." That's because the Spanish flu virus caused an exaggerated immune-inflammatory response in ...Geoscientists follow arsenic from chicken feed to streambeds
Blacksburg, Va. What happened to the chicken when she crossed the road is less important that what happens to what she eats when it is used as fertilizer. Organic arsenic is fed to poultry to prevent bacterial infections and improve weight gain. A little bit of arsenic is taken u...