Body

New VIB/UGent research adds an extra dimension to the known set of human proteins. Genes can shift their expression towards alternative protein versions (proteoforms) that rival their full length counterparts in stability. For that reason, the diversity of human proteins seems to be fundamentally underestimated. Professors Petra Van Damme and Kris Gevaert report these results in the journal Molecular Systems Biology this month.

Insecticide-treated nets may still help prevent malaria despite mosquitoes developing resistance, according to a new study published in Parasites & Vectors.

These nets have contributed to the prevention of millions of deaths due to malaria, but in recent years, there has been growing concern that mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the pyrethroid insecticides used on the nets, making them less effective. However, the impact of this resistance on malaria as a public health problem has been harder to demonstrate, for reasons that remain unclear.

Stanford, CA -- During the daytime, plants convert the Sun's energy into sugars using photosynthesis, a complex, multi-stage biochemical process. New work from a team including Carnegie's Mark Heinnickel, Wenqiang Yang, and Arthur Grossman identified a protein needed for assembling the photosynthetic apparatus that may help us understand the history of photosynthesis back in the early days of life on Earth, a time when oxygen was not abundant in the atmosphere. Their work is published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The WikiLeaks organization was criticized for providing a target list for terrorists when it published a secret memo in 2010 with 200 international sites that the U.S. Department of State considered critical to national security.

Was there any truth to that claim?

Dr. Daniel G. Arce, Ashbel Smith Professor and program head of economics in the UT Dallas School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, wanted to find out. In a new study published in the International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, he found no evidence that the leak led to any attacks.

ITHACA, N.Y. - The courtship and mating behaviors of the perky Australian red-backed fairy-wren have evolved into nothing short of a free-for-all. The rampant promiscuity of both sexes is legendary.

What's a fairy-wren to do to keep from wasting energy raising another male's chicks? New research from scientists at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology provides a surprising answer: Sing with your mate.

University of Toronto researcher Rachel Harding will be the first known biomedical researcher to welcome the world to review her lab notes in real time. The post-doctoral fellow with U of T's Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is also explaining her findings to the general public through her blog. She hopes her open approach will accelerate research into Huntington's disease.

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Radiotherapy effectively damages brain tumors but the cancer cells can repair themselves in order to live on. Now, researchers at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center have tested a strategy that combines radiotherapy with a drug that shuts down the ability of tumor to mend themselves.

TORONTO, Feb, 26, 2016 -- The number of men smoking tobacco in India rose by more than one-third to 108 million between 1998 and 2015, according to a new study published today in the journal BMJ Global Health.

The study also found that cigarettes were replacing the traditional bidi, a small, inexpensive Indian cigarette, possibly due to substantially higher income in India and population growth.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - University of Louisville School of Dentistry researchers have found a bacterial species responsible for gum disease, Porphyromonas gingivalis, is present in 61 percent of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). The findings, published recently in Infectious Agents and Cancer, only detected P. gingivalis in 12 percent of tissues adjacent to the cancerous cells, while this organism was undetected in normal esophageal tissue.

Bank voles are small rodents that are not dangerous by themselves, but their excreta can contain one of the dangerous hantaviruses. While bank voles are unaffected by the infection, hantaviruses can cause potentially fatal diseases in humans for which no treatments exist. In central and northern Europe, infection is accompanied by fever, headache, or even renal failure. The strain that occurs in East Asia -- the Hantaan virus -- is even more dangerous: up to five percent of infected patients die of hemorrhagic fever, renal failure, or severe respiratory disorders.

A study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a new parallel-computing approach based on a combination of nanotechnology and biology that can solve combinatorial problems. The approach is scalable, error-tolerant, energy-efficient, and can be implemented with existing technologies.

Dementia and other tauopathies, most notably Alzheimer's disease, embody a class of neurodegenerative diseases associated with the aggregation of the Tau protein in the human brain. These diseases represent one of the leading causes of death and disability in the elderly population in the western world, with no current effective therapy.

Reliable information about the structure of pharmaceutical compounds is important for patient safety, for the development of related drugs and for patenting purposes. However, working out the structures of pharmaceuticals can be tough. The individual molecules can pack together in the solid in different ways to form different polymorphs, and pertinent properties such as stability, bioavailability or how fast they dissolve in the stomach can vary from one polymorph to another.

The immune cells, called natural killer cells, hunt and destroy foreign cells in the body, including cancer cells that spread and form tumours.

A team led by Dr Nick Huntington, from the institute's Molecular Immunology division, has found for the first time how the 'switch' that turns on these natural killer cells works.

The team found that the switch, a protein called ID2, works by allowing natural killer cells to become responsive to growth factors in the blood.

In a surprise result, James Cook University scientists have found female blacktip reef sharks and their young stay close to shore over long time periods, with adult males only appearing during the breeding season.

The researchers also discovered the sharks had a mysterious attraction to a specific bay near Townsville.

Lead author, JCU's Dr Andrew Chin, said the data from an area adjacent to the city wasn't what they expected and points to an even more important role for coastal areas than previously thought.