Body

HOUSTON - (Dec. 21, 2015) - Rice University researchers have a new twist for those clinging to old ideas about a basic biological process.

The Rice lab of theoretical biological physicist Peter Wolynes reported this week that the activity of a master regulator in cells is determined by kinetics, a notion that counters decades-old classical models in molecular biology that attribute the control of genetic processes to the thermodynamics of biochemical reactions.

EAST LANSING, MI - Competition for limited water resources is challenging producers of container-grown nursery plants to investigate alternative irrigation strategies. One water-conserving method available to nurseries is scheduling irrigation in response to plants' daily water use (DWU), a technique that has been shown to reduce water applications between 6% and 75% without negatively impacting the growth of ornamental shrubs.

LA JOLLA, CA - December 21, 2015 - A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital shows how a protein involved in cancer twists and morphs into different structures.

"We're studying basic biophysics, but we believe the complexity and rules we uncover for the physics of protein disorder and folding could one day also be used for better designs of therapeutics," said TSRI Associate Professor Ashok Deniz, senior author of the new study along with Richard Kriwacki, faculty member at St. Jude.

For women with low-risk pregnancies who plan to give birth at home with the help of a midwife, there is no increased risk of harm to the baby, compared with a planned hospital visit, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

The study compared 11 493 planned home births and 11 493 planned hospital births in Ontario, Canada's largest province, over 3 years to determine the risk of stillbirth, neonatal death or serious events among low-risk women. They included both first-time mothers (35%) and women who had previously given birth (65%).

Physicians, researchers and other members of the biomedical community in Canada should demand information on drug safety and effectiveness, argues Matthew Herder, law professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

"Write to the Minister of Health to request drug safety and effectiveness data from Health Canada; push the regulator for better terms of access to enable meaningful, independent scrutiny of pharmaceutical data and help motivate institutional change," he states in a Humanities article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Immune suppressor cells called MDSCs (myeloid-derived suppressor cells) may be important in developing treatments for advanced prostate cancer, according to a study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

MDSCs are immune cells that "expand" when faced with cancer, inflammation or infections, giving them the unique ability to suppress the body's T-cell response to disease.

Jumping is not about fun and games for insect larvae. They must do it to survive. This manoeuvre is all about finding a shady spot to develop in, according to researchers from Kyushu University in Japan, who led research into the jumping behavior of a minute parasitic wasp, published in Springer's journal The Science of Nature.

Most horses today are treasured for their ability to run, work, or be ridden, but have lost their wild-type camouflage: pale hair with zebra-like dark stripes known as the Dun pattern. Now an international team of scientists has discovered what causes the Dun pattern and why it is lost in most horses. The results, published today in Nature Genetics, reveal a new mechanism of skin and hair biology, and provide new insight into horse domestication.

An international study of about 43,000 people has significantly expanded the number of genetic factors known to play a role in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of vision loss among people age 50 and older. Supported by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, the findings may help improve our understanding of the biological processes that lead to AMD and identify new therapeutic targets for potential drug development.

A majority of hematologic oncologists report that end-of-life (EOL) discussions happen with patients with blood cancers too late, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Oreofe O. Odejide, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, and coauthors examined the timing of EOL discussions through a survey completed by 349 hematologic oncologists (57.3 percent response rate).

EPFL scientists have found that chronic inflammation can cause regenerating cells to grow into new, aberrant types; this is called metaplasia, and is a disorder linked to prolonged inflammation. The study highlights a new concept of chronic inflammation and could lead to better treatments.

In one of the latest examples of precision medicine, teams of geneticists from nine countries, involving more than 100 scientists, analyzed the genes of more than 33,000 individuals in the hope of finding genetic variations responsible for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss among people age 50 or older. Their research, involving complex computational analysis of more than 12 million genetic variations across the human genome, identified 52 variations associated with the disease.

Mutations present in a blood cancer known as follicular lymphoma have revealed new molecular targets for potential treatments, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) together with collaborators at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bar Harbor, Maine - A butterfly-shaped pigment accumulation in the macula of the eye, which can lead to severe vision loss in some patients, is due to mutations in the alpha-catenin 1 gene (CTNNA1), an international research consortium including a team from The Jackson Laboratory reports in Nature Genetics.

The findings may have relevance to understanding macular degenerative diseases.

The world of epigenetics -- where molecular 'switches' attached to DNA turn genes on and off -- has just got bigger with the discovery by a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge of a new type of epigenetic modification.

Published today in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, the discovery suggests that many more DNA modifications than previously thought may exist in human, mouse and other vertebrates.