New Haven, Conn. — Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is the most common potentially lethal genetic disease—about a half million people in the United States alone suffer from the condition. There is no cure, but new research could open the door to new gene therapies for treating most cases of the disease. For several decades, researchers have known that mutations in the PKD1 gene, which encodes the polycystin-1 (PC1) protein, can cause the disease in about 80% of cases. However, the protein is too big to be modified through gene therapy strategies. Now, a research ...

Have you ever been so hungry that you become angry, otherwise known as “hangry?” New research by Adam Rosenthal, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, has found that some bacteria cells get hangry too, releasing harmful toxins into our bodies and making us sick. Rosenthal and his colleagues from Harvard, Princeton and Danisco Animal Nutrition discovered, using a recently developed technology, that genetically identical cells within a bacterial community have different functions, with some members behaving more docile and others producing the very toxins that make us feel ill. “Bacteria behave much more ...

The Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will expand its research training program in skin biology with support from a five-year, $1.3 million T32 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS). The research training program in Systems Skin Biology will take a multidisciplinary approach in teaching scientists to holistically understand human physiology, health, and disease. As a recognized leader in research for skin biology and skin diseases, Mount Sinai will also become an incubator for future ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A recent grant from the Missouri Department of Economic Development will help train hundreds of MU students to become part-time nurse assistants at MU Health Care. The three-year grant, which starts in fall 2023, will create a three-credit hour elective course within the MU Sinclair School of Nursing. The class will help nearly 100 MU students each year earn paid, part-time positions within MU Health Care as nurse assistants, also known as unlicensed assistive personnel (UAPs), certified nurse assistants (CNAs) and patient care technicians. “We currently have nearly 800 pre-nursing undergraduate students at MU, and as a professor teaching a freshmen-level course, I ...

New Haven, Conn. — Each person has about 4 million sequence differences in their genome relative to the reference human genome. These differences are known as variants. A central goal in precision medicine is understanding which of these variants contribute to disease in a particular patient. Therefore, much of the human genome annotation effort is devoted to developing resources to help interpret the relative contribution of human variants to different observable phenotypes – i.e., determining variant impact. Recently, Yale School of Medicine led a large NIH-sponsored study where multiple institutions and international collaborators came together ...

Pangolins, unique scale-covered mammals, are drastically declining in numbers across Asia and Africa, largely due to illegal trade. Part of the trade, both legal and illegal, supports the traditional Chinese medicine market, which has attracted conservation attention. The level of demand for pangolins and other animals in traditional Chinese medicine, however, hasn’t been thoroughly studied. In a new study published in the journal Nature Conservation, Dr Yifu Wang, currently a postdoc researcher at the University ...

A family of ‘promiscuous’ proteins found in all land plants is responsible for many different plant functions, despite remaining relatively unchanged for over 450 million years. New findings, published in Nature Plants and New Phytologist reveal new knowledge about how DELLA proteins regulate how much a plant grows, when germination occurs and how plants deals with threats such as drought and disease. The key is not in DELLA proteins’ ability to mutate over time, but instead in their ability to interact with dozens of different transcription factors, the proteins responsible for decoding DNA. Understanding the mechanisms which underpin ...

If you’re an avid gardener, you may have considered peat moss — decomposed Sphagnum moss that helps retain moisture in soil — to enhance your home soil mixture. And while the potting medium can help plants thrive, it’s also a key component of peatlands: wetlands characterized by a thick layer of water-saturated, carbon-rich peat beneath living Sphagnum moss, trees, and other plant life.  These ecosystems cover just 3% of Earth’s land area, but “peatlands store over one-third of all soil carbon on the planet,” explains Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological ...

Catherine Maclean, Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, received $641,155 from the National Institutes of Health for: "Paid Sick Leave Mandates and Mental Healthcare Service Use."  This project will provide the first causal estimates of the effect of state and local paid sick leave (PSL) mandates on access to PSL among those with mental health disorder(s), use of mental health care, and indicators of potential quality of mental health care received. It will also examine how community-level factors (e.g., mental health ...

More than 10 million people are sickened by tuberculosis (TB) globally each year, resulting in 1.5 million deaths. Yet, as many as two billion people are infected with Mycobaterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and are otherwise healthy and asymptomatic. Scientists who study TB look at those individuals who can tolerate and contain the infection in hopes of developing better treatments and vaccines. The key feature of tuberculosis infection in humans is the formation of granulomas, or clusters of immune cells in the lungs that contain the infection. These granulomas contain B cells, all-purpose immune cells that perform a variety of functions, from producing ...

Earth's magnetic field does more than keep everyone's compass needles pointed in the same direction. It also helps preserve Earth’s sliver of life-sustaining atmosphere by deflecting high energy particles and plasma regularly blasted out of the sun. Researchers have now identified a prospective Earth-sized planet in another solar system as a prime candidate for also having a magnetic field — YZ Ceti b, a rocky planet orbiting a star about 12 light-years away from Earth. Researchers Sebastian Pineda and Jackie Villadsen observed a repeating radio signal emanating from the star YZ Ceti using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a radio telescope ...

Pregnant women whose household tap water had higher levels of lithium had a moderately higher risk of their offspring being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, according to a new study led by a UCLA Health researcher. The study, published April 3 in JAMA Pediatrics, is believed to be the first to identify naturally occurring lithium in drinking water as a possible environmental risk factor for autism. “Any drinking water contaminants that may affect the developing human brain deserve intense scrutiny,” said lead study author Beate Ritz, MD, PhD, professor of neurology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA ...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have been working on mucosal vaccines that can be administered through the nose. Now, scientists in Berlin have developed a live attenuated vaccine for the nose. In “Nature Microbiology”, they describe the special immune protection it induces. Joint press release by Freie Universität Berlin, Max Delbrück Center and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Coronaviruses spread primarily through the air. When infected people speak, cough, sneeze or laugh, they expel droplets of saliva containing the virus. Other people then breathe ...

The research, published today in Nature Geoscience and led by the University of Bristol and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), puts the rise in part down to the chemicals, known as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, being used to make other ozone-friendly alternatives to CFCs. This is an exception allowed under the Montreal Protocol, but contrary to its wider goals. Lead author Dr Luke Western, a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and researcher at the NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML), said: “We’re paying attention to these emissions now because of the success of the Montreal Protocol. CFC ...

BOSTON — Women are more likely than men to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with women making up two-thirds of the population living with AD. A new study, led by Mass General Brigham researchers, sheds light on the relationship between the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and age of menopause and use of hormone therapy (HT). The results, published in JAMA Neurology, indicate that early age at menopause may be a risk factor for AD dementia, but that women who were prescribed HT around the age of menopause onset did not show increased risk. “HT is the most reliable way to ameliorate severe menopause symptoms, ...

About The Study: In this study of 460,000 privately insured postpartum women, patients who gave birth to a single, live newborn after March 2020 were more likely to fill more potent and more frequent opioid prescriptions than patients who gave birth prior to March 2020. Increases were larger for patients delivering via cesarean birth than those delivering vaginally. Increases in opioid prescriptions may be associated with increased risk of opioid misuse, opioid use disorder, and opioid-related overdose among postpartum women.  Authors: Shelby R. Steuart, M.P.A., of ...

New knowledge of the genetic factors behind premature delivery and gestational duration has now emerged. Findings presented by a major international study under the aegis of the University of Gothenburg include the ways in which, before birth, the woman’s and the unborn child’s genes have mutually antagonistic effects. These results, now published in the journal Nature Genetics, enhance the potential for long-term development of drugs to induce parturition (birth) and — even more importantly — achieve the goal of preventing preterm births. Globally, preterm (or premature) birth is the most frequent immediate cause of death among newborns and children ...

The number of prostate cancer patients in the U.S. choosing active surveillance over surgery or radiation has rapidly increased since 2010, rising from 16% to 60% for low-risk patients and from 8% to 22% for patients with favorable intermediate-risk cancers, according to a study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.    Active surveillance includes actively monitoring prostate cancer for progression, with the intention to intervene with surgery or radiation therapy if the cancer progresses.    It is the preferred treatment option for men with low-risk ...

Imperial physicists have recreated the famous double-slit experiment, which showed light behaving as particles and a wave, in time rather than space. The experiment relies on materials that can change their optical properties in fractions of a second, which could be used in new technologies or to explore fundamental questions in physics. The original double-slit experiment, performed in 1801 by Thomas Young at the Royal Institution, showed that light acts as a wave. Further experiments, however, showed that light actually ...

Philadelphia, April 3, 2023—In a significant step for the treatment of neuroblastoma, an international group of researchers led by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University and the New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium has shown that the targeted therapy lorlatinib is safe and effective in treating high-risk neuroblastoma. The findings, published today in Nature Medicine, have led to a major amendment in a phase 3 Children’s Oncology Group (COG) clinical trial, which has incorporated lorlatinib for newly diagnosed ALK-driven high-risk neuroblastoma, ...

A new study reveals that the mass loss of lake-terminating glaciers in the greater Himalaya has been significantly underestimated, due to the inability of satellites to see glacier changes occurring underwater, with critical implications for the region's future projections of glacier disappearance and water resources. Published in Nature Geoscience on April 3, the study was conducted by an international team including researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Graz University of Technology (Austria), the University of St. Andrews (UK), and Carnegie Mellon ...

Professors Stefan Seelecke and Paul Motzki at Saarland University are developing intelligent materials that are opening up new avenues in sound reproduction technology: lightweight loudspeakers that use far less energy than their conventional counterparts, novel shapes for sound and signal generators and applications involving noise cancelling textiles. The basis for these smart materials are ultrathin silicone films that can act as artificial muscles with their own built-in sensors. The research team will be showcasing their new technology at this year’s Hannover Messe from 17 to 21 April (Hall 2, Stand B34). Ultrathin films may well replace the heavy and power-thirsty ...

            New Orleans, LA -- LSU Health New Orleans Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) has published the sixth report of statewide cancer incidence rates by census tract. The publication, which reports 2010-2019 combined cancer incidence data, found that 81% of the census tracts in Louisiana met publication criteria for all cancers combined. For specific cancer types, fewer census tracts met the criteria. For the Louisiana census tracts meeting the criteria, the incidence rates for all cancers combined and for specific cancer types were compared with the corresponding rates for the entire state. The ...

Anticancer drugs are pivotal to cancer treatment, but their toxicity may not always be limited to cancer cells, resulting in harmful side-effects. To develop anticancer therapies that have fewer adverse effects on patients, scientists are now focusing on molecules that are less toxic to cells. One such group of drugs is the "kinesin inhibitors." These inhibitors prevent cancer progression by explicitly targeting kinesin motor proteins, which are required for the division of cancer cells. Centromere-associated protein E (CENP-E), a member of the kinesin motor protein, is a promising target for inhibitor therapy, as it is essential for tumor cell replication. However, determining the ...

Organic materials with room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) emission have attracted extensive attention due to extraordinary properties including long lifetime, large Stokes shift, stimuli-responsiveness, and so on, and show bright prospects in broad fields. However, the energy of the excited state of organic phosphors is easily consumed through thermal radiation and collision deactivation. Therefore, numerous design strategies such as creating a rigid environment through crystallization and supramolecular assembly are employed to improve the luminescent characteristics of RTP materials by restricting nonradiative transition, enhancing intersystem crossing, and so forth. A team ...