Building on data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project, a multi-institutional team of scientists has completed the first large-scale "proteogenomic" study of breast cancer, linking DNA mutations to protein signaling and helping pinpoint the genes that drive cancer.
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Vampires are real, and they've been around for millions of years. At least, the amoebae variety has. So suggests new research from UC Santa Barbara paleobiologist Susannah Porter.
Using a scanning electron microscope to examine minute fossils, Porter found perfectly circular drill holes that may have been formed by an ancient relation of Vampyrellidae amoebae. These single-celled creatures perforate the walls of their prey and reach inside to consume its cell contents. Porter's findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Symptoms of illness are not inevitably tied to an underlying disease --rather, many organisms, including humans, adapt their symptom expression to suit their needs. That's the finding of Arizona State University's Leonid Tiokhin, whose research appears in the Quarterly Review of Biology.
La Jolla, Calif., May 25, 2016 -- Research led by scientists at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) has identified a new regulator of immune responses. The study, published recently in Immunity, sheds new light on why T cells fail to clear chronic infections and eliminate tumors. The findings open the door for a new approach to modulating T cell responses in many clinical settings, including infections, autoimmune diseases, and tumors that are unresponsive to currently available therapies.
Borides are among the hardest and most heat-resistant substances on the planet, but their Achilles' Heel, like so many materials', is that they oxidize at high temperatures. Oxidation is the chemical reaction commonly known as corrosion or rusting -- it can signal the end for a material's structural integrity. But researchers from Drexel University, Linkoping University in Sweden and Imperial College London have produced an aluminum-layered boride whose unique behavior at high temperatures keeps it one step ahead of nature's slow march toward high- temperature chemical degradation.
Jeremy Berg, Associate Senior Vice Chancellor for Science Strategy and Planning in the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been named by the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to serve as editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, beginning 1 July 2016.
How sensitive an ecosystem is to unforeseen environmental stress can be determined, according to Daniel Bruno, previous visiting researcher at Umeå University. The approach is to study how many species there are in an ecosystem and what proportion of these can replace species that are hard hit by environmental disturbances. Thanks to this new knowledge, we can predict how various ecosystems react to environmental disturbances, which is necessary to maintain these systems in a sustainable way.
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 25, 2016 - Radiation oncologists from across the United States convened on Capitol Hill yesterday to encourage members of Congress to invest in cancer research with sustainable and predictable funding and to protect patients' access to high quality cancer care through value-based physician payment models. The 95 doctors were in Washington for approximately 150 meetings with Congressional leaders from their home districts and states as part of the American Society for Radiation Oncology's (ASTRO) 13th annual Advocacy Day.
Advanced prostate cancer is usually treated by removing androgen, the male hormone that helps it grow. Although initially effective, this treatment often leads to the tumor becoming castration resistant- a lethal condition. Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and University of Michigan, along with collaborators in other institutions, have determined that castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) has particular metabolic characteristics that may open new possibilities for treatment. The results appear in Nature Communications.
Psoriasis is an inflammatory skin condition that affects some 125 million people worldwide. It is characterized by itchy, scaly skin plaques. The exact cause of psoriasis is unclear. But mounting evidence implicates the immune system in the overproduction of cell-signalling molecules called cytokines, which stimulate skin cells called keratinocytes to express genes that maintain an inflammatory microenvironment. Now, scientists at Hokkaido University in Japan have found more evidence that a cytokine called IL-17A is especially critical in this process.
Escherichia coli (E. coli) are bacteria that live all around and inside of us. Most E. coli are harmless, but some strains can cause illness, and can even, in extreme cases, be deadly. With recent outbreaks of E. coli around the world, there is a fear of acquiring an infection from these bacteria. An important component of fighting these kinds of bad bacteria is a better understanding of how bacteria divide and multiply. In each bacterium, a large protein complex - called the divisome - governs cell division.
A study of more than 6,000 marine fossils from the Antarctic shows that the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was sudden and just as deadly to life in the polar regions.
Previously, scientists had thought that creatures living in the southernmost regions of the planet would have been in a less perilous position during the mass extinction event than those elsewhere on Earth.
Yale researchers were fishing for a new weapon against antibiotic resistance and found one floating in a Connecticut pond, they report May 26, 2016 in the journal Scientific Reports.
With the emerald ash borer beetle devastating ash tree populations throughout the United States -- from locations as far north as Massachusetts and as far south as Louisiana -- solutions to help fight the insect are critical.
In nearly every biological community, distributions among species are highly uneven. That is, there is a large number of rare species with very few members and only a small number of common species concentrating most members of the community.