Tiny roundworm's telomeres help scientists to tease apart different types of aging
...old age although its telomeres are still long, and moves with a youthful spring in its crawl despite short telomeres, they report in PLoS Genetics, available online now. In the past, preventing telomere shortening has often been portrayed as the key to preventing aging and living longer. In their study, S...Gene discovery sheds light on causes of rare disease, cancer
...them up). FANCM apparently provides an engine that moves the FA DNA repair machine along the length of DNA. It also is a key component of the complex that is switched "on" or "off" by phosphorylation, or the addition of a phosphate group to a protein, in response to DNA damage. In the future, researchers h...Beetle-inspired switch uses water for bonding
...a bond created by surface tension, a water droplet moves to the top or bottom of a flat plate surface using electricity from electrodes. The electricity moves positively charged atoms, called ions, in the water through the minute capillaries of a thin disk of...New look at DNA hints at origin of ultraviolet damage
... on the ladder. The new study shows that UV energy moves vertically, between successive bases. In undamaged DNA, there are no chemical bonds between vertically stacked bases. But the bases do interact electronically, which is why Kohler thinks they form an efficient conduit for UV energy to flow through. ......ratory) biomechanics expert who studies how muscle moves skeletons in fish and frogs has invented a backpack that gives new meaning to the term power walking. In a paper published in the September 9 issue of Science, Lawrence C. Rome, a University of Pennsylvania biology professor who spends his summers c...It's a bug's life: MIT team tells moving tale
...s per second (for comparison, an Olympian sprinter moves at about five body lengths per second). For example, Hu and Bush found that two species of water treaders have retractable claws on their front and hind legs that allow them to "grasp" the surface of the water and pull it into a miniscule peak. The ...Image of myosin-actin interaction revealed in cover story of Molecular Cell
...r hand along the track, similar to the way a child moves along the monkey bars in a playground. Myosin V differs from the other myosin family proteins in that it is able to sustain this processive motion, enduring many hydrolysis cycles. The other myosins grab on tightly to actin and release after one hyd...Say what? Bacterial conversation stoppers
...n, properly controlling its behavior." "This study moves us closer to really understanding how these interactions happen in nature," Bassler said. "Bacteria can communicate between species, and they have evolved mechanisms to interfere with the communication. Probably this is but one of many cunning strate...Navigating the brain for sense of direction as paradigm for higher cognitive functions
...pecific "set" of such cells will fire when the rat moves in an ever-changing series of cells sets continuously fire. The current paper reports an important aspect in how the brain integrates the various signal pathways, Sharp said, and "though we didn't find the origin of the place cells, we believe these...Free-energy theory borne out in large-scale protein folding
...thermodynamic route that the protein follows as it moves toward equilibrium," said co-author Cecilia Clementi, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator Assistant Professor of Chemistry. The Rice research team included Clementi, Clementi's graduate student Payel Das, experimentalist Pernilla Wittung-St...UCSB researchers discover that the cell's endosomes use a surprising transportation system
...the cell's center for processing. Even if the cell moves or if there's increased traffic flow, there's never a traffic jam on the microtubules. While it has long been known that endosomes travel in a bidirectional way, it has not previously been established that the transport system is symmetrical. The aut...CU's Torres discusses avian flu and policy
...Russia, raising concern in the U.S. as the disease moves west. Although waterfowl do not appear to be playing a big role in poultry and human transmissions right now, they are being closely monitored. "When experts look at the maps of the areas affected by avian influenza in Asia and they look at the flyi...Jefferson scientists uncover new clues to how crucial molecular gatekeepers work
...ositively charged transmembrane segment called S4, moves towards the outside of the cell through a small mo...rised of the S4 segment and part of the S3 segment moves through the cell membrane, carrying S4's positive charges with it across the lipid. As in the conven...Scientists discover secret behind human red blood cell's amazing flexibility
...echnique that revealed how a single proto-filament moves in response to the pulling force of six spectrin fibers attached to it. Their paper in Annals of Biomedical Engineering uses aeronautical terms commonly used to describe the changing position of an airplane to explain how the six attached spectrin fi...Gene that helps mosquitoes fight off malaria parasite identified
...mans who have malaria. As the parasite matures, it moves from the mosquito's midgut to its salivary glands. Once in the salivary glands, the Plasmodium can be injected into another human when the mosquito feeds again. In the study, the researchers determined that the SPRN6 gene, which is normally switched...Study sheds light on signaling mechanism in stem cells, cancer
...erves as the fulcrum in a series of acrobatic like moves between the Hedgehog signal and the Smoothened protein. Once Hedgehog has latched on to its receptor on the target cell's surface, it prompts the cell to move Smoothened, located in vesicles around the cell's nucleus, to the primary cilium. The posit...New and sharper X-rays of cell's ribosome could lead to better antibiotics
...unit finds the start position, the "large" subunit moves in and latches on, clamping the mRNA between them. The combined machine slides along the mRNA, reading each three-letter codon, matching this code to the appropriate amino acid, and then adding that amino acid - one of 20 possible building blocks - t...Turning sensation into perception
...ry somatosensory cortex (S1). The information then moves to other parts of the brain, where it can contribute to memory, decision-making, and motor outputs. To explore what regions of the brain contribute to sensory perception, Romo and de Lafuente analyzed neural activity associated with the sense of touc...New microscope allows scientists to track a functioning protein with atomic-level precision
...ous elongation: Ihe inchworm model, in which RNAP moves along DNA like an inchworm, with the front end of ...hing to within the size of an atom, so if the beam moves just 1 angstrom, that's the end of the story. We took all the optics external to the microscope, enc...Nanoparticles, nanoshells, nanotubes: How tiny specks may provide powerful tools against cancer
...high numbers. When this happens, the p53 "payload" moves into the tumor cell. "If we are going to have an effective cancer therapy, we have to be able to treat metastatic lesions," says Chang. "The problem is tumor-specific delivery, and the key is to deliver this nanocomplex systemically. We've been usi...