Body

Logic suggests that online shopping is "greener" than traditional shopping. After all, when people shop from home, they are not jumping into their cars, one by one, to travel to the mall or the big box store.

WASHINGTON (February 5, 2016) -- An examination of 130 gene expression studies in 10 solid cancers has found that when any of four related genes is overexpressed, patients have much worse outcomes, including reduced survival.

Researchers from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center say their study, published Feb. 3 in Oncotarget, shows that this Ly6 family of genes allows cancer cells to act like cancer stem cells -- which keep dividing and growing without pause.

The first pay-for-performance (P4P) evaluation of pediatricians under a full-risk Medicaid accountable care organization (ACO) for children shows P4P incentives were partially responsible for higher performance on quality measures across Partners for Kids' primary care network of employed and affiliated physicians, according to study authors at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

At the end of December 2015, a huge storm named "Goliath" dumped 9-10 inches of rain in a belt across the central United States, centered just southwest of St. Louis, most of it in a three-day downpour.

The rain blanketed the Meramec Basin, an area of 4,000 square miles drained by the Meramec River, which enters the Mississippi River south of St. Louis.

Two years ago, Ellen Martinsen, was collecting mosquitoes at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, looking for malaria that might infect birds--when she discovered something strange: a DNA profile, from parasites in the mosquitoes, that she couldn't identify.

ROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Cellular senescence -- when a cell can no longer divide -- is a programmed stage in a cell's life cycle. Sometimes, as in aging, we wish it didn't happen so much and sometimes, as in cancer, we wish it would happen more. Given its important impacts on health, biologists wish they could explain more about what's happening in cells when senescence takes hold. A new study helps by showing that chromosomes become somewhat transformed, altering their patterns of gene expression.

A first-ever interlaboratory study of four versions of a therapeutic protein drug--all manufactured from living cells--reports that an established analytical tool akin to magnetic resonance imaging reliably assessed the atomic structures of the biologically similar products, yielding the equivalent of a fingerprint for each.

Oxford University scientists researching PAD4, a protein that plays a role in the development of inflammatory diseases like arthritis and which is regularly found in cancers have uncovered the protein's role in cancer development. Their results are published online by the journal Science Advances.

Peptidyl arginine deiminase 4 (PAD4) is an enzyme that plays a role in genetic expression - turning our genetic code into functional products in the body.

Elastin is a crucial building block in our bodies - its flexibility allows skin to stretch and twist, blood vessels to expand and relax with every heartbeat, and lungs to swell and contract with each breath. But exactly how this protein-based tissue achieves this flexibility remained an unsolved question - until now.

This material has a remarkable combination of flexibility and durability: elastin is one of the body's most long-lasting component proteins, with an average survival time comparable to a human lifespan.

As medical professionals search for new ways to personalize diagnosis and treatment of disease, a research team at the University of Iowa has already put into practice what may be the next big step in precision medicine: personalized proteomics.

A look-back analysis of HPV infection antibodies in patients treated for oropharyngeal (mouth and throat) cancers linked to HPV infection suggests at least one of the antibodies could be useful in identifying those at risk for a recurrence of the cancer, say scientists at The Johns Hopkins University. A report on the study is published in the February issue of Cancer Prevention Research.

BETHESDA, Md. - Feb. 5, 2016 - The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), the premier global, non-profit organization serving molecular diagnostic professionals, has updated its pathology residency curriculum recommendations for 10 critical molecular pathology topics. The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics today published the AMP paper titled, "A Suggested Molecular Pathology Curriculum for Residents: A Report of the Association for Molecular Pathology."

WASHINGTON (Feb. 5, 2016) - A new method for detection of infection in wounds could take physicians less than a minute to complete, rather than the current 24 hours it takes to plate bacteria and leave it to incubate overnight, according to research by the George Washington University's (GW) Victoria Shanmugam, M.D.

When metastatic tumors driven by drug-targetable genetic mutations become resistant to a targeted therapy drug, the usual practice is to biopsy a single metastatic lesion to test for new mutations that can guide the selection of next-line therapies. Investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center and the University of Torino in Italy have found that this strategy may miss additional targetable mutations that arise in different metastases.

Breaking up may not be that hard to do after all. A new report appearing in The FASEB Journal suggests that the once close relationship between basic science and clinical medicine appears to be on the rocks, as the number of basic science research articles appearing in medical specialty journals has fallen dramatically over the past 20 years.