Other highlights in the January 3 JNCI
...ues injected doxorubicin-containing liposomes into rats bearing fibrosarcomas. The researchers monitored the rats continuously using magnetic resonance imaging to watch how the liposomes distributed in the body. Th......umans, common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), mice, rats and dogs. Gene families are sets of genes in ever...at are shared by humans, common chimpanzees, mice, rats and dogs. They found that 5,622, or 56 per cent, of the gene families they studied from these five s...Contrary to common wisdom, scientist discovers some mammals can smell objects under water
...ng behavior of comparably sized land mammals, like rats and mice. "Rats and mice don't sniff the way we do," Catania said. "They push air 'out-in out-in' in a fashion strikingly similar to what the star-nosed mole is doing, except that it is doing it under water." Catania mounted a high-speed video camera...New neurons could act to alleviate epilepsy
...Hospital and Stem Cell Center described studies in rats examining neurons generated after an epileptic eve...ompared the properties of new neurons generated in rats allowed to exercise by running on a wheel with those in rats in which epileptic seizures were induce...Human-chimp difference may be bigger
...umans, common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), mice, rats and dogs. The scientists found that 5,622, or 56 percent, of the gene families they studied from these five species have grown or shrunk in the number of genes per gene family, suggesting changes in gene number have been so common as to constitute an...Worms produce surprise insight into human fever
...icrobial infections. Warm-blooded homeotherms like rats (and people) can increase their internal body temperature in response to infection, yet even cold-blooded poikilotherms like worms migrate toward warmer environments in response to infections. But the mechanism of fever as a response to infection is ...CU study reveals pros and cons of therapy for lead exposure
...esult from lead exposure, a Cornell study of young rats finds. However, in a further finding that has impl...f autistic children, the researchers say that when rats with no lead in their systems were treated with the lead-removing chemical, they showed declines in ...From managing sugar to managing healing
...tly enhanced the healing process. Skin wounds in rats treated topically with insulin healed faster"surface cells in the epidermis covered the wound more quickly and cells in the dermis, the deeper part of the skin, were faster in rebuilding blood vessels. In follow-up studies of human skin cells in cul...A new approach to growing heart muscle
... experiments to transplant BEHM into the hearts of rats that have suffered heart attacks, and see if the new tissue can heal the damage. This work is being conducted by Francesco Migneco, M.D., a research fellow with the Artificial Heart Laboratory. Further studies will implement "bioreactors" that will e...Cocaine high caused by interference in neuronal receiving stations
... from their neighbors. The researchers' studies in rats found that when the animals received cocaine, a co...lled NR2B. Further experiments revealed that when rats were given cocaine, a specific subunit of dopamine receptors, called D2R, tended to attach to the NR...Prenatal alcohol exposure appears to increase an infant's stress response
...: Clinical & Experimental Research . "Studies on rats and monkeys have shown that the offspring of mothers who drink alcohol during pregnancy develop both elevated and depressed stress hormone responses to challenges," said David W. Haley, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto a...Nerve fibers need specific growth factor chemical to form connections within the brain
...aboratory model of Alzheimer's disease. Laboratory rats with experimental damage to forebrain cholinergic circuits will be treated with either nerve growth factor or neurotrophin-3, or a combination of both, to determine their ability to produce anatomical, molecular and behavioral recovery....Speak, memory: Research challenges theory of memory storage
...rat brains. To mimic the deepest sleep states, the rats were anesthetized then fitted with two electrodes. One electrode measured the electrical activity of thousands of cells in the neocortex. These cells were excitatory, meaning that they spark communication between nerve cells. The other electrode reco......f the National Academy of Sciences. The study in rats found that cone snail toxins named RgIA and Vc1.1 ...ompression and injury from sciatica. That made the rats overly sensitive to touch on one hind paw but not the other. Each rat's sensitivity was assessed by ...In young rats, researchers find a reaction to spinal cord injury that speeds recovery
...same process does not work as efficiently in adult rats and thus recovery time is much longer, the researc... of their axons. In studying spinal cord injury in rats − the usual model for this kind of investigation − researchers had thought that younger ...Gene therapy inhibits epilepsy in animals
...esearch by Dr. Brooks-Kayal's group had found that rats with epilepsy had lower levels of the alpha1 subun...e rats' brains. The researchers later injected the rats with pilocarpine, a drug that causes status epilepticus (SE), a convulsive seizure, shortly after in...Scientists use gene therapy to improve memory and learning in animals
...ecreted from the adrenal glands in male and female rats during times of stress. When high levels of these ...Stress tests The goal of the study was to see if rats treated with gene therapy would perform differently than normal rats during the water maze tests fol...Chronic jet-lag conditions hasten death in aged mice
...rprising fraction of old (but genetically altered) rats exposed to a six-hour advance in their light cycle died after the shift in schedule. In the new work, the researchers examined the mortality link in earnest by looking at how young mice and old mice fared when subjected to two different types of li...Researchers writing story of the 'alcoholic lung'
... With these findings in mind, the researchers fed rats an alcohol-containing liquid diet for six weeks to mimic chronic alcohol abuse. They then applied GM-CSF to epithelial cells impaired by the rats' alcohol ingestion. They found that GM-CSF restores claudin protein function and the cells' air-fluid ba...Low levels of neurotransmitter serotonin may perpetuate child abuse across generations
...nd infant abuse in primates. Other research using rats as animal models has shown that serotonin production is influenced by a mother's treatment of her offspring early in their lives and affects the offsprings's responses to stress in adulthood. In earlier research on abuse of infant monkeys, Maestrip...