ANN ARBOR--As if holiday travel isn't stressful enough. Now University of Michigan researchers say we're likely sharing that already overcrowded airline cabin with countless tiny creatures including house dust mites.
"What people might not realize when they board a plane is that they can share the flight with a myriad of microscopic passengers-- including house dust mites--that take advantage of humanity's technological progress for their own benefit," said U-M biologist Pavel Klimov.
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have identified two compounds that appear, in cellular and animal models, to block the cardiac damage caused by the important chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. Their report in the Dec. 10 issue of Science Translational Medicine indicates that inhibiting the action of an enzyme that is key to the generation of cellular energy in mitochondria could prevent doxorubicin-induced damage to cardiac cells without reducing the drug's anti-tumor effects.
Rats that received thyroid hormones had a reduced risk for dangerous heart arrhythmias following a heart attack, according to a new study by a team of medical researchers at New York Institute of Technology.
In the NIH-funded study, published in the Journal of Cardiac Failure, the team found that thyroid hormone replacement therapy significantly reduced the incidence of atrial fibrillation - a specific kind of irregular heartbeat, or arrhythmia -- in the rats, compared to a control group that did not receive the hormones.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers for the first time have developed a method to track through the human body the movement of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, as extraordinarily tiny amounts of these potential carcinogens are biologically processed and eliminated.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Using a gene-editing system originally developed to delete specific genes, MIT researchers have now shown that they can reliably turn on any gene of their choosing in living cells.
CAMBRIDGE, MA, December 10, 2014 - A team of investigators from the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital and other leading biomedical research institutions has pinpointed rare mutations in a gene called APOA5 that increase a person's risk of having a heart attack early in life. These mutations disable the APOA5 gene and also raise the levels in the blood of triglyceride-rich lipoproteins, a type of fat.
Stem cells in early embryos have unlimited potential; they can become any type of cell, and researchers hope to one day harness this rejuvenating power to heal disease and injury. To do so, they must, among other things, figure out how to reliably arrest stem cells in a Peter Pan-like state of indefinite youth and potential. It's clear the right environment can help accomplish this, acting as a sort of Neverland for stem cells. Only now are scientists beginning to understand how.
INDIANAPOLIS -- How do some proteins survive the extreme heat generated when they catalyze reactions that can happen as many as a million times per second? Work by researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and the University of California Berkeley published online on Dec. 10 in Nature provides an explosive answer to this important question.
In a ground-breaking paper published in Nature, they show that the three protein complexes act in relay to regulate cell division: reactivation of one leads to the second becoming active.
A sex-changing fish called California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) plays a vital role in the food web of kelp forests along the Pacific coast. Commonly found in the waters from Baja California to Point Conception -- although they can sometimes be found as far north as Monterey Bay -- sheephead feed on sea urchins, whose grazing habits can wreak havoc on community composition in kelp forests.
A University of Colorado Cancer Center study being presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium shows that triple negative breast cancer cells process tryptophan to promote survival while traveling through the body in order to seed new tumor sites.
DALLAS - Dec. 10, 2014 - UT Southwestern Medical Center microbiologists have identified key bacteria in the gut whose resources are hijacked to spread harmful foodborne E. coli infections and other intestinal illnesses.
BERKELEY -- Future fitness trackers could soon add blood-oxygen levels to the list of vital signs measured with new technology developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley.
New Haven, Conn. - A new combination of cancer drugs delayed disease progression for patients with hormone-receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer, according to a multi-center phase II trial. The findings of the randomized study (S6-03) were presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 6-9, by Kerin Adelson, M.D., assistant professor of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Center and chief quality officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven.
Anticipated changes in climate will push West Coast marine species from sharks to salmon northward an average of 30 kilometers per decade, shaking up fish communities and shifting fishing grounds, according to a new study published in Progress in Oceanography.
The study suggests that shifting species will likely move into the habitats of other marine life to the north, especially in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Some will simultaneously disappear from areas at the southern end of their ranges, especially off Oregon and California.