Body

AMHERST, Mass. - Though research on protein folding has progressed over the past few decades toward better understanding of human metabolism and the diseases associated with misfolding, important discoveries are still being made by teams who can bring special techniques and tools to bear on these complex cellular processes.

It took nearly a half trillion tries before researchers at The University of Texas at Austin witnessed a rare event and perhaps solved an evolutionary puzzle about how introns, non-coding sequences of DNA located within genes, multiply in a genome. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, address fundamental questions about the evolution of new species and could expand our understanding of gene expression and the causes of diseases such as cancer.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the main cause of death in the world, killing 17.5 million people every year according to WHO figures. Prevention strategies based on risk prediction are now a top public health priority, and there is great interest in developing new biomarkers of cardiovascular risk that allow a more accurate risk predication than classical risk factors such as high cholesterol, smoking, physical inactivity, and high blood pressure.

MIAMI, May 23, 2016 - A recent study by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine revealed that triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which has generally been unresponsive to hormone receptor-targeted treatments, can indeed be treated using vitamin D and androgen receptor-targeted therapy. The discovery offers a new treatment option beyond chemotherapy for this aggressive type of breast cancer. The study was published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.

For reasons that remain unclear at least in the smaller babies, both birthweight extremes appear to increase the likelihood of early development of dangerous fat around major organs in the abdomen that significantly increases these risks, said Dr. Brian Stansfield, neonatologist at the Children's Hospital of Georgia and the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

The National Cancer Moonshot initiative needs to move beyond genomics to target the proteins that are driving cancer, according to an Inova Health System and George Mason University collaborative paper published Thursday in the American Association for Cancer Research.

President Barack Obama announced the National Cancer Moonshot during his 2016 State of the Union Address. About $1 billion is expected next year to fund the initiative's goal of achieving a decade's worth of research in five years by focusing on immunotherapy, genomics and combination therapies.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Researchers identified a single enzyme doing the work of a trio thought necessary to control a common cellular signaling process being pursued as a therapeutic target.

It's a win-win situation for the environment and the economy when it comes to introducing legumes into agricultural systems, says new research published in Frontiers in Plant Science, carried out by an international team of scientists as part of the European Union project, Legume Futures.

Currently Europe's crop production is highly specialized in only a small number of plant species, to the detriment of the environment. Cereal crops dominate, meaning Europe imports over 70% of its protein feed stocks to support the meat industry.

London, UK, May 23, 2016 - The spread of yellow fever (YF) is a global health threat. In response to current outbreaks in Angola, other African countries, and China, which represents the first ever documented cases of YF in Asia, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened an emergency committee on May 19, 2016 to underscore the severity of the outbreak.

Imagine, for a moment, you are a parent trying to limit how much dessert your sugar-craving young children can eat.

"You can have cake or ice cream," you say, confident a clear parental guideline has been laid out.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - Sweet cherries are susceptible to a condition called "cracking", in which the skin of the fruit is strained, causing fractures or "cracks". The condition, which limits marketability of the fruit, may be a result of factors such as excessive water uptake or weak fruit skins. In a new study published in the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science (March 2016) researchers examined the mechanical properties of different cherry cultivars to determine how these properties impact skin cracking.

As our technology downsizes, scientists often operate in microscopic-scale jungles, where modern-day explorers develop new methods for transporting microscopic objects of different sizes across non uniform environments, without losing them. Now, Pietro Tierno and Arthur Straube from the University of Barcelona, Spain, have developed a new method for selectively controlling, via a change in magnetic field, the aggregation or disaggregation of magnetically interacting particles of two distinct sizes in suspension in a liquid. Previous studies only focused on one particle size.

Viruses evolve quickly. A small tweak to the genetic makeup of a mostly mild strain of influenza can give rise to the next pandemic. An equally small change to the same strain in a different setting can fade it into obscurity. The right trait at the right time is everything.

A group of scientists from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and Yale University are studying exactly how viral evolution occurs, and how that knowledge might help prevent disease.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Purdue University researchers may have figured out a way to call off a cancer cell assassin that sometimes goes rogue and assign it a larger tumor-specific "hit list."

T cells are the immune system's natural defense against cancer and other harmful entities in the human body. However, the cells must be activated and taught by the immune system to recognize cancer cells in order to seek out and destroy them. Unfortunately, many types of cancer manage to thwart this process.

Philadelphia, PA, May 23, 2016 - Over the past decade, interest has been rising in fermented dairy foods that promote health and could potentially prevent diseases such as hypertension (high blood pressure). Functional dairy products that lower blood pressure and heart rate may offer consumers an effective alternative to antihypertensive drugs if their effectiveness can be demonstrated. Investigators reporting in the Journal of Dairy Science® review the scientific basis of reported claims and identify opportunities for developing products based on new lactic acid bacteria.