Princeton scientists have identified genes responsible for controlling reproductive life span in worms and found they may control genes regulating similar functions in humans.
The work suggests that someday researchers may be able to develop ways to maintain fertility in humans, allowing women who want to delay having children to preserve that capacity and extend their reproduction, and to prevent maternal age-related birth defects.
A variant of last year's pandemic influenza linked to fatal cases carried a mutation that enabled it to infect a different subset of cells lining the airway, according to new research. The study, due to be published next week in the Journal of Virology, suggests that the mutant virus could have impaired the lungs' ability to clear out germs.
A toxin found in the venom of the Central American bark scorpion (Centruroides margaritatus) could hold the key to reducing heart bypass failures, according to research from the University of Leeds.
The study, published online in Cardiovascular Research, reports that one of the scorpion's toxins, margatoxin, is at least 100 times more potent at preventing neointimal hyperplasia – the most comon cause of bypass graft failure - than any other known compound.
A more personalized treatment for people with a type of metastatic liver cancer --hepatocellular carcinoma -- may be possible by targeting the protein c-Met, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the number three cause of cancer deaths in the world.
Measuring three biomarkers in a single blood sample may improve physicians' ability to identify patients at high risk of developing chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Research led by Klaus Stark and Christian Hengstenberg of the University of Regensburg identified a common variant of the cardiovascular heat shock protein gene, HSPB7, which was found to increase risk for dilated cardiomyopathy by almost 50%. Their paper appears on October 28 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.
STANFORD, Calif. — In a study to be published online Oct. 21 in PLoS Genetics, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have implicated the lack of a protein important in hooking our skin cells together in the most common variety of skin cancer. Depletion of this protein, called Perp, could be an early indicator of skin cancer development, and could be useful for staging and establishing prognoses.
Injecting a protein that helps break down triglycerides may someday help treat an inherited form of high triglycerides, according to a new study in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, an American Heart Association journal.
Triglyceride is a type of fat in the blood. Elevated levels in the blood — hypertriglyceridemia — have been linked to coronary artery disease.
Treating metabolic syndrome and undergoing carotid angioplasty may prevent recurrent stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), according to revised American Heart Association/American Stroke Association guidelines.
Last updated in 2006, the evidence-based guidelines for doctors will be published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Boston, Mass. - A cholesterol-lowering drug reduced the enlarged prostates of hamsters to the same extent as a drug commonly used to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), report researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and their colleagues in the October issue of the Journal of Urology. Together, the drugs worked even better.
LA JOLLA, CA, October 21, 2010 — A multi-institutional consortium led by The Scripps Research Institute scientists, the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), is the sole focus of a special issue of the journal Acta Crystallographica Section F. This is the first time in the history of the monthly journal, which publishes peer-reviewed crystallography and structural biology articles, that an entire issue is devoted to the works of a single scientific center.
WHAT: Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found that the major malaria-transmitting mosquito species, Anopheles gambiae, is evolving into two separate species with different traits, a development that could both complicate malaria control efforts and potentially require new disease prevention methods. Their findings were published in back-to-back articles in the October 22 issue of the journal Science.
(Embargoed) Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have reported the exact molecular structure and mechanisms of a major cell signaling pathway that serves a broad range of functions in humans.
Most flowering plants, equipped with both male and female sex organs, can fertilize themselves and procreate without the aid of a mate. But this may only present a short-term adaptive benefit, according to a team of researchers led by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists, who report that long-term evolutionary survival of a species favors flowers that welcome pollen from another plant.
