Hepatitis C virus (HCV) hijacks the host's fat metabolism for its own survival, growth, and transport in the human body. A study published on April 28th in PLOS Pathogens identifies a host gene involved in the formation of HCV virus particles and helps explain why humans with a rare mutation in the gene have problems with their fat metabolism.
Body
This Special Issue on the microbiome features three reports, three Reviews and a Perspective that capture the many ways in which the microbes within our gut influence our health, and what in turn shapes this complex community.
Researchers have induced human fibroblasts into cardiomyocyte-like cells using just nine compounds, and show that these modified cells can be used to partially heal mouse hearts following a heart attack. Cardiomyocytes are muscle cells in the heart that help it beat, but these can become damaged following heart attack. Inducing non-cardiac cells to act as cardiomyocytes and transferring them to the heart could open new avenues for cardiac regenerative therapies, similar to how stem cells have contributed to regenerative medicine.
In this investigative news piece from Science, contributing correspondent John Bohannon dives into data from Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate website for scholarly literature. For the first time, basic questions about Sci-Hub's millions of users can be answered: Where are they and what are they reading? Bohannon's statistical analysis is based on server log data supplied by Alexandra Elbakyan herself, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011.
Everything you eat or drink affects your intestinal bacteria, and is likely to have an impact on your health. That is the finding of a large-scale study led by RUG/UMCG geneticist Cisca Wijmenga into the effect of food and medicine on the bacterial diversity in the human gut, which is published this Friday in the prestigious research journal Science.
Work by an internationally renowned University of Rochester professor may offer an alternative to the way in which researchers have approached some photonics applications.
For the first time, scientists studying stool transplants have been able to track which strains of bacteria from a donor take hold in a patient's gut after a transplant. The team, led by EMBL with collaborators at Wageningen University and the Academic Medical Centre, both in the Netherlands, and the University of Helsinki, Finland found that compatibility between donor and patient likely plays a bigger role in these transplants than previously thought.
Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is pretty amazing. It has already been shown in several studies to be effective in boosting metabolism. And now a team of researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Integrated Systems Physiology (LISP), headed by Johan Auwerx, has unveiled even more of its secrets. An article written by Hongbo Zhang, a PhD student on the team, was published today in Science and describes the positive effects of NR on the functioning of stem cells. These effects can only be described as restorative.
RNA splicing is a major underlying factor that links mutations to complex traits and diseases, according to an exhaustive analysis of gene expression in whole genome and cell line data. Reporting in Science on April 29, 2016 researchers from the University of Chicago and Stanford University studied how thousands of mutations affect gene regulation in traits such as height, and diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
African American women with ovarian cancer are more likely to die from the disease than are White women and they are also much more likely to be obese. These factors may be linked by the new finding that excess abdominal fat in overweight and obese women could interfere with the detection of early symptoms of ovarian cancer, as presented in a study published in Journal of Women's Health.
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai say that tiny doses of a cancer drug may stop the raging, uncontrollable immune response to infection that leads to sepsis and kills up to 500,000 people a year in the U.S. The new drug treatment may also benefit millions of people worldwide who are affected by infections and pandemics.
Pioneering gene therapy has restored some vision to patients with a rare form of genetic blindness for as long as four years, raising hopes it could be used to cure common causes of vision loss, new University of Oxford research published today shows.
A technique which involves injecting a virus into the eye to deliver billions of healthy genes to replace a key missing gene for choroideremia sufferers has provided sustained improvement in vision for up four years for some patients.
A new study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota and Nantes University Hospital in France shows that the bacteria in people's gut may predict their risk of life-threatening blood infections following high-dose chemotherapy.
The study was published today in Genome Medicine, a peer-reviewed open access journal.
Metastasis. The very word evokes fear. Defined as the spread of cancer cells from one part of the body to another, metastasis is the cause of approximately 90 percent of deaths among cancer patients. How does metastasis come about? And can we stop it?
While the Fontan procedure has improved the short- and mid-term outcomes for patients born with single ventricle anatomy, long-term complications of Fontan circulation include heart failure. These complications are thought to be secondary to elevated central venous pressure, chronic venous congestion and low cardiac output.