Insulin grown in plants relieves diabetes in mice; UCF study holds promise for humans
...ks. By the end of the study, the diabetic mice had normal blood and urine sugar levels, and their cells were producing normal levels of insulin. Those results and prior research indicate that insulin capsules could someday ...St. Jude study solves mystery of mammalian ears
...s contract in response to incoming sound waves as normal prestin does. Instead, the mutated form of prestin makes the cell extend itself when it vibrates. The St. Jude researchers reasoned that if altering the position of the cilia in the fluid changes the ability of the cilia to amplify sound, then hea...A new brake on cellular energy production discovered
...eart failure and Parkinsons disease, as well as in normal ageing....$9M grant awarded to University of Cincinnati for bipolar disorder research
...des of mania and depression, often with periods of normal mood in between. Some symptoms of a manic episode include increased energy, activity and restlessness, excessively high or overly euphoric mood, and extreme irritability. In contrast, a depressive episode is characterized by a lasting sad, anxious, o...Smithsonian's National Zoo researchers use electronic eggs to help save threatened species
...er incubate them artificially. Understanding the normal activities of breeding is essential for improving husbandry practices for a species. But much of this basic biological information remains unknown for many threatened and endangered species. Temperatures and turning frequencies for artificially incub...U-M team identifies gene that regulates blood-forming fetal stem cells
...ancers that afflict blood-forming cells and hijack normal stem cell self-renewal mechanisms. "One of the next questions in our cross hairs is whether Sox17 gets inappropriately activated in certain childhood leukemias---and that's an idea that nobody had in their mind before this work," Morrison said. "If...Carnegie Mellon scientists find key HIV protein makes cell membranes bend more easily
...nergy of manufactured lipid bilayers made to mimic normal cell membranes. Lipid bilayers provide a protective barrier for the cell against intruders, yet also contain molecules to recognize and communicate with other cells or get nutrients. Cells also communicate with one another via small, membrane-bound v...UCLA study links air pollution to clogged arteries
...present in polluted air and are also byproducts of normal processes, such as the metabolic conversion of food into energy. Diesel particles are coated in chemicals containing free radicals, and the fatty acids in LDL cholesterol generate free radicals during metabolism in the cells, said first author Ke ...Scratch no more: Gene for itch sensation discovered
...at lacked this gene scratched much less than their normal cage-mates when given itchy stimuli. The laborato...GRPR gene to find out how they were different from normal mice. "The research was a little disappointing at first," Chen says. "The knockout mice seemed to h...Researchers watch antibiotics, bacteria meet at atomic level
...esearchers found that the antibiotic prevented the normal operation of the elongation complex by freezing it in the inactive state. They saw a loop-shaped element that must close every time the elongation complex adds a nucleotide (a building block of DNA or RNA) to the growing RNA chain. This loop must o...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...The authors examined mice that expressed 5% of the normal protein (VMAT2 LO). These mice showed elevated reactive oxygen species, age-related neurodegeneration in the striatum, reduced striatal dopamine levels, and a corresponding decrease in locomotor behavior. By 18 months, VMAT2 LO mice had lower striata...Drug protects brain cells in Huntington's disease model, researchers find
...chers conducted various coordination tests on both normal and genetically manipulated mice. Engineered mice given a drug that increased brain dopamine levels performed worse on these tasks, while TBZ protected against this effect. Most importantly, TBZ appears to reduce significantly cell loss in the striat...CTRC enrolls first patients in novel phase II study for sarcoma -- living virus destroys cancer cell
..., that is toxic to cancer cells but not harmful to normal cells. This novel therapy, using a living virus, ... to use fundamental differences between cancer and normal cells as the basis for effective anti-cancer approaches and we are thus very excited about the this ...Steroids, not songs, spur growth of brain regions in sparrows
...en deafened were just as large as those regions in normal sparrows. However, the deafened birds only sang one-eighth the number of songs that the hearing birds sang. To show this, the researchers captured 19 adult male white-crowned sparrows during their fall migration and housed them in short-day light ...Brain's 'hearing center' may reorganize after implant of cochlear device
...in the ear to allow deaf people to hearmay restore normal auditory pathways in the brain even after many yea...owed changes that mirrored patterns in people with normal hearing more closely. The results were published in the July 18 Journal of Neuroscience . "The re...Effects of aging in stem cells
...lecular, cellular, and organismal levels. Over the normal course of aging, chromatin dysregulation leads to ...on of many genes, which in turn leads to a loss of normal cellular functions and a loss of growth regulation. These changes ultimately increase the risk of ca......ficient females who were, themselves, genetically normal - were displaying a number of abnormalities, most noticeably marked hair loss across their trunks and growth retardation. The scientists determined that these abnormalities were due to their ingestion of toxic milk from their PPAR-deficient mothers: ......ene was so defective that it could not fulfill its normal function anymore! Results such as these raise fundamental questions. For one, they qualify the value of the model genomes sequenced so far. "There isn’t such a thing as the genome of a species," says Weigel. He adds "The insight that the DNA sequen...'Preconditioning' helps protect brain's blood vessels from stroke
...of the stroke and continue to function at a nearly normal level. That's something no one had shown before." He stressed that it's far too dangerous to give patients peroxynitrite, so the goal here is to figure out how low concentrations of the chemical work their protective magic. "What cell signaling m......, they found the mice lived 18 percent longer than normal mice. Because reducing insulin-like signaling in the neurons of roundworms and fruitflies extends their lifespan, the researchers decided to examine what would happen when they knocked out one or both copies of the Irs2 gene only in the brains of ...