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Stem cells hold the key to wound healing, as they develop into specialised cell types throughout the body - including in teeth.
Now an international team of researchers has found a mechanism that could offer a potential novel solution to tooth repair.
Published today (Friday 9 August) in Nature Communications, the study showed that a gene called Dlk1 enhances stem cell activation and tissue regeneration in tooth healing.
MADISON, Wis. -- For nearly 100 years, scientists thought they understood everything there was to know about how metals bend.
They were wrong.
Materials science and engineering researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demonstrated that the rules of metal-bending aren't so hard and fast after all. They described their findings Aug. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
Their surprising discovery not only upends previous notions about how metals deform, but could help guide the creation of stronger, more durable materials.
The brains of Alzheimer's patients who have already developed clinical symptoms contain large clumps of the protein beta-amyloid, known as plaques. Many therapeutic approaches focus on removing plaques, but such attempts have met with only limited success to date.
Glioblastoma, a cancer that arises in the brain's supporting glial cells, is one of the worst diagnoses a child can receive. The grade IV, highly malignant tumor aggressively infiltrates healthy brain tissue, and most children die of the disease within one to two years of diagnosis, similar to adults.
Aug. 9, 2019--Certain traits may define a type of obstructive sleep apnea that can be effectively treated with an oral appliance, according to new research published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
With OSA there are times during sleep when air cannot flow normally into the lungs. The collapse of the soft tissues in the back of the throat or tongue usually causes the airflow obstruction.
Researchers at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) have identified an epigenetic mechanism that appears to strongly influence healthy aging. It's a protein that controls muscle integrity, lifespan and levels of an essential sugar. How does one protein have that much power?
Lack of sleep can be dangerous; it is thought to play a role in up to 30% of all motor vehicle crashes and even implicated in catastrophic events, such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1, 2). As sleepy individuals are often unaware of their performance impairments, there is a critical need for objective measures of deficits due to sleepiness to prevent accidents. New research published today in the The Journal of Physiology shows that a range of eye-movement tests provide a reliable biomarker of individual acute sleep loss.
The discovery of the mechanics and molecular mechanism that dictate cell shape formation in plants by a team of McGill researchers offers new clues about the fundamental processes governing tissue formation in multicellular organisms.
Plants are made of cells that come in a wide array of shapes and sizes, each of which is closely related and essential to the function of a specific tissue.
Scientists have taken the temperature of a huge expanse of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean in new research by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Canada. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, is accompanied by the release of a large marine heat flow dataset collected by the USGS from an ice island drifting in the Arctic Ocean between 1963 and 1973. These never-before-published data greatly expand the number of marine heat flow measurements in the high Arctic Ocean.
A comprehensive functional analysis of TP53 mutations in human leukemia may refute a working hypothesis - primarily based on mouse studies - that missense mutations confer new cancer-causing functions to the p53 tumor suppressor protein; the new study instead suggests that these mutations exert a "dominant-negative" effect that reduces the cancer-suppressing activity of wild-type p53, the authors say. The TP53 gene was discovered 40 years ago and it now known to be the most frequently mutated gene in human cancer.
Female adolescents are experiencing relationship abuse at alarming rates, according to a new Michigan State University study that specifically researched reproductive coercion - a form of abuse in which a woman is pressured to become pregnant against her wishes.
Heather McCauley, assistant professor in the School of Social Work, and co-researchers found nearly one in eight females between ages 14 and 19 experienced reproductive coercion within the last three months. Forms of such abuse included tampering with condoms and a partner threatening to leave.
Differences in how our brains respond when we're anticipating a financial reward are due, in part, to genetic differences, according to research with identical and fraternal twins published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that how we experience pleasure and reward is at least partly heritable.
Treating cancer more selectively and more effectively - this could be achieved with an innovative technology developed by teams of researchers at the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). The process transforms proteins and antibodies into stable, highly functional drug transporters, with which tumor cells can be detected and killed.
It's a classic question in contemporary politics: Does partisan news media coverage shape people's ideologies? Or do people decide to consume political media that is already aligned with their beliefs?
Marine heatwaves are a much bigger threat to coral reefs than previously thought, research revealing a previously unrecognized impact of climate change on coral reefs has shown.
In the study, scientists show for the first time what really happens to corals during marine heatwaves, and they reveal that it's not just coral animals that are affected - their skeletons start to decay within weeks, too. This means that the 3D coral framework which provides home to many other animals on the reef is also at risk.