One of astronomy's big questions is why galaxies forming as recently as 1 billion years after the Big Bang contain so much dust. The leading hypothesis is that supernovae, stars that explode at the end of their lives, contain large amounts of metal-enriched material that, in turn, harbors key ingredients of dust, like silicon, iron and carbon.
HOUSTON (March 29, 2009) – The allergen breathed in by a person with asthma triggers a proteinase or enzyme called MMP7 that activates a cascade of events to prompt an allergic reaction, said a consortium of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine (www.bcm.edu) in Houston in a report that appears online today in the journal Nature Immunology.
A 12-year-old Dutch boy – bedridden for three years because of an inherited cardiac arrhythmia syndrome – can now join his friends on the soccer field thanks to a discovery made by Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers.
The investigators, led by Björn Knollmann, M.D., Ph.D., report this week in Nature Medicine that the clinically available drug flecainide prevents potentially lethal arrhythmias in patients with a specific type of exercise or stress-induced arrhythmia disorder called CPVT.
"It's potentially a breakthrough in the treatment of this rare syndrome," said Knollmann, associate professor of Medicine and Pharmacology.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Based on research that reveals new insight into mechanisms that allow invasive tumor cells to move, researchers at the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida have a new understanding about how to stop cancer from spreading. A cancer that spreads elsewhere in the body, known as metastasis, is the process that most often leads to death from the disease.
In the March 29 online issue of Nature Cell Biology, researchers say that a molecule known as protein kinase D1 (PKD1) is key to the ability of a tumor cell to "remodel" its structure, enabling it to migrate and invade. The researchers found that if PKD1 is active, tumor cells cannot move, a finding they say explains why PKD1 is silenced in some invasive cancers.
PHILADELPHIA –- A team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania has completed a research study begun in 1915 and determined that a snail making its home in the northwest Atlantic Ocean around Mount Desert Island, Me., has experienced a dramatic increase in the size of its shell during less than a century, providing a clear illustration of how fast and effectively change can occur.
The study is published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 27 (AScribe Newswire) -- A team of University of Maryland scientists has paved the way for the development of new drug therapies to combat active and asymptomatic (latent) tuberculosis infections by characterizing the unique structure and mechanism of an enzyme in M. tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease. Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Barbara Gerratana, in the university's College of Chemical and Life Sciences, led the research team, which included her graduate student Melissa Resto and Assistant Professor Nicole LaRonde-LeBlanc.
NEW YORK (March 27, 2009) -- Researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center have identified a new marker for breast cancer metastasis called TMEM, for Tumor Microenvironment of Metastasis. As reported in the March 24 online edition of the journal Clinical Cancer Research, density of TMEM was associated with the development of distant organ metastasis via the bloodstream -- the most common cause of death from breast cancer.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI)–funded translational study could lead to the first test to predict the likelihood of breast cancer metastasis via the bloodstream -- a development that could change the way breast cancer is treated.
A study published in Journal of Insurance Medicine by members of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University Medical Center has demonstrated an economic benefit to the diagnosis of celiac disease in a national managed-care population in the United States.
Peter HR Green, M.D., Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director, Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University Medical Center, had this to say about the study (Journal of Insurance Medicine, 2008;40:218-228) and the economic benefits of increased diagnosis of celiac disease: "We now have evidence that the increased awareness and diagnosis of celiac disease would benefit not only the patients but would result in health care costs savings."
DURHAM, NC – Drug-eluting stents were safe and superior to bare metal stents in preventing death and heart attacks among 262,700 "real-world" patients enrolled in a nationwide registry of cardiovascular disease, according to researchers from Duke University Medical Center.
The findings were presented today at the i2Summit at the American College of Cardiology's 58th Annual Scientific Session. They also appear online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The study is the largest of its kind to date and may end years of controversy over the safety of the devices.
The study's findings appear to echo the insect worlds portrayed in the animated films Antz and Bee Movie, in which the characters live in rigidly conformist societies.
Scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford reached their conclusion by creating a mathematical model to study the manner in which cooperative groups of animals, known as superorganisms, evolve.
Waltham, MA—In a new study this week in Nature, researchers at Brandeis University and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, U.K.) for the first time shed light on a crucial step in the complex process by which human genetic information is transmitted to action in the human cell and frequently at which point genetic disease develops in humans.
The scientists report that they were able to crystallize a very large complex of a macromolecular "machine" in the human cell and determine its structure or what it actually looks like, thereby zeroing in on the process of genetic encoding. Importantly, 15 to 20 percent of all human genetic disorders, including muscular dystrophy, are caused by defects in this genetic encoding process known as RNA splicing.
High-dosage perioperative brachytherapy (applied within the surgical process) obtains excellent results in the treatment of head and neck tumours, at the same time as reducing the period of radiation. These are the conclusions of research undertaken jointly by three Departments at the University of Navarra Hospital and which was published in the latest issue of Brachytherapy, official journal of the American Society of Brachytherapy.
A team of scientists at Emory University School of Medicine has identified a direct link between oxidative stress and inflammatory signals in the blood. The finding could lead to improved strategies for preventing several diseases by including antioxidants in the diet and for reducing the impact of inflammation in critically ill patients by adding cysteine to intravenous or tube feeding.
The results are published online this week in the journal PLoS One.
Many normal metabolic functions produce reactive forms of oxygen that can damage cells. Oxidative stress, a disruption of the body's ability to control reactive forms of oxygen, has been connected with heart disease, diabetes and several neurodegenerative diseases.
