Body

Lipoma of the small intestine is a benign tumor of mesenchymal origin which is mostly found by chance during gastrointestinal investigation. Invaginations account for 2/3 of small bowel occlusion caused by up to 80% of tumors and the lipoma is the most frequent benign tumor that causes invagination in its submucous polypoid and it is in more or less scissile form. However, multiple lipomas within the intestinal duplication canal as a predominant cause of partial intestinal obstruction is an exceptional clinical scenario.

HOUSTON – Human adult stem cells injected around the damage caused by a heart attack survived in the heart and improved its pumping efficiency for a year in a mouse model, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report online ahead of publication in Circulation Research.

The study, with researchers at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, used innovative imaging techniques developed by researchers at MD Anderson to track the stem cells' location and performance over time.

Gastric cancer is the most common malignant gastrointestinal cancer and accounts for 25% of cancer deaths. Nuclear matrix, a filamentous protein framework for eukaryotic cellular chromatin, closely relates to DNA duplication and transcription. Research on nuclear matrix proteins will provide insight into how tumors developed.

Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be an effective alternative to minimally invasive MR arthrography for the diagnosis of hip labral tears, a common cause of hip pain, according to a study to be presented at the ARRS 2010 Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA.

Pregnancy places competing demands on a mother's physiology: Her body wants to produce a strong healthy baby but not at the expense of her own health. Some of the genes that she passes on to her child therefore try to protect her own body from excessive demands from her child. These so-called "imprinted genes" inherited from the father however do not show the same restraint – their goal is to get as many resources for the fetus as possible.

Scientists in Ohio studying Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) have concluded that the technology now exists to carry out nationwide screening of newborn children and pregnant mothers. The study, published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, reveals that effective screening may allow parents to find proactive treatments before the symptoms become irreversible.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Chronic pain severely limits patients' quality of life and is among the cost drivers in U.S. health care. Patients can suffer pain without an apparent cause and often fail to respond to available treatments. Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators now report that chronic pain may be caused by the inadvertent reprogramming of more than 2,000 genes in the peripheral nervous system. The research findings appear in the current issue of the journal Genome Research.

Three new genetic loci have been identified with involvement in subtle and quantitative variation of human eye colour. The study, led by Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is published May 6 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

People aren't the only living things that suffer from stress. Trees must deal with stress too. It can come from a lack of water or too much water, from scarcity of a needed nutrient, from pollution or a changing climate. Helping trees and crops adapt to stress quickly and efficiently is a pressing goal of plant biologists worldwide.

Some of the human immune system's defences against the virus that causes dengue fever actually help the virus to infect more cells, according to new research published today in the journal Science.

The researchers behind the work, from Imperial College London, hope their new findings could help with the design of a vaccine against the dengue virus. The study also brings scientists closer to understanding why people who contract dengue fever more than once usually experience more severe and dangerous symptoms the second time around.

A breakthrough about the formation and maintenance of tree-like nerve cell structures could have future applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and the repair of injuries in which neurons are damaged. The findings by the international team led by Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Biology are published in the May 6th issue of Science Express.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neandertals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neandertals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees?

Researchers have produced the first whole genome sequence of the 3 billion letters in the Neanderthal genome, and the initial analysis suggests that up to 2 percent of the DNA in the genome of present-day humans outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals or in Neanderthals' ancestors.

The international research team, which includes researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, reports its findings in the May 7, 2010, issue of Science.

SANTA CRUZ, CA--After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, yielding important new insights into the evolution of modern humans.

Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans.