Malaria parasites cause hundreds of millions of infections, and kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, mostly in Africa. And in recent years the most dangerous malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, has become increasingly resistant to the main anti-malarial drugs. Now, an international team of researchers shows that some members of a class of compounds called oxaboroles, which contain the element, boron, have potent activity against malaria parasites.
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CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a new cause of Parkinson's disease -- mutations in a gene called TMEM230. This appears to be the third gene definitively linked to confirmed cases of the common movement disorder.
OAKLAND, Calif., June 6, 2016 -- Daughters of overweight mothers who develop gestational diabetes are significantly more likely to experience an earlier onset of one sign of puberty, according to new Kaiser Permanente research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Researchers from the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University have engineered endogenous protein inhibitors of protein-degrading enzymes as an alternative approach to synthetic inhibitors for potentially treating cancer and other diseases. Results of their study, titled "Thermodynamics of Selectivity in N-TIMP/MMP Interactions," were recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Research into kidney regeneration, an organ that has been extremely difficult to regenerate, has taken a great stride forward with research coming out of a collaboration between Kumamoto University, Japan and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the US. The research demonstrates a method of increasing kidney progenitor cell proliferation in vitro. These progenitor cells contribute to the formation of kidney tissues but normally disappear before or soon after birth.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - A new metastatic melanoma study suggests that a combination of two immunotherapies may be better than one:
Griffith University researchers have found evidence that demonstrates Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia, as reported in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal this week.
The work refutes an earlier landmark study that claimed to recover DNA sequences from the oldest known Australian, Mungo Man.
This earlier study was interpreted as evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians, and that Mungo Man represented an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.
iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the sub-tropical north-eastern corner of South Africa has become famous for its birdlife, crocodiles and hippopotamuses that frolic in the warm estuarine waters of Lake St Lucia.
The Neanderthal genome included harmful mutations that made the hominids around 40% less reproductively fit than modern humans, according to estimates published in the latest issue of the journal GENETICS. Non-African humans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with Neanderthals, though much of it has been lost over time. The results suggest that these harmful gene variants continue to reduce the fitness of some populations today. The study also has implications for management of endangered species.
As a new tool in CRISPR genome editing, Cpf1 has sparked an explosion of interest for its attributes that differ from Cas9: It requires only a single RNA that CRISPR RNA assembly is simpler; its staggered cleavage patterns may facilitate substituting existing DNA with desired sequences; and it recognizes thymidine-rich DNA sequences, which has been less explored than the guanosine-rich sequences recognized by Cas9. In sum, Cpf1 is expected to broaden the scope of CRISPR genome editing target sites with enhanced efficiency.
For most of the last 45,000 years Europe was inhabited solely by hunter-gatherers. About 8,500 years ago a new form of subsistence - farming - started to spread across the continent from modern-day Turkey, reaching central Europe by 7,500 years ago and Britain by 6,100 years ago. This new subsistence strategy led to profound changes in society, including greater population density, new diseases, and poorer health. Such was the impact of farming on how we live that scientists have debated for more than 100 years how it was spread across Europe.
Roads present a serious threat to bat populations, indicating that protection policies are failing.
The University of Exeter experts studied data collected across Europe and concluded that roads present "a real and growing danger" to protected bat populations. The research, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), concluded bats were often reluctant to cross roads, disrupting their ability to reach feeding and roosting areas. The group also identified more than 1,000 bat fatalities caused by collisions with cars.
Microorganisms can better withstand the heavy metal uranium when glutathione is present, a molecule composed of three amino acids. Scientists from the German based Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Bern in Switzerland have now proven this resilience by closely examining cell heat balance. They discovered that glutathione is an effective decontamination agent. The studies provide important insights into bioremediation of mining waste piles and other contaminated areas with the help of bacteria or plants.
Many marine invertebrates have complex life histories in which the planktonic larval phase acts as the vehicle to connect otherwise disjointed benthic adult populations which are mostly non-mobile. Larval swimming behaviors in response to various chemical, biological and physical cues have important implications for the adult populations, but to date, most studies on larvae-flow interactions have focused on competent larvae near settlement.
Cell biologists' most notorious approach to detect and semi-quantify proteins, western blotting, could well be on its way down. Professor Sven Eyckerman (VIB/UGent) and colleagues developed a set of universal protein tags that warrant protein quantification via targeted proteomics techniques. The development and applications of these new tags - named Proteotypic peptides for Quantification by SRM (PQS) - are described in the online, open access journal Scientific Reports.