peer review/experimental study/animals/cells Researchers from Uppsala University show in a new study that inhibition of the protein EZH2 can reduce the growth of cancer cells in the blood cancer multiple myeloma. The reduction is caused by changes in the cancer cells' metabolism. These changes can be used as markers to discriminate whether a patient would respond to treatment by EZH2 inhibition. The study has been published in the journal Cell Death & Disease. Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer where immune cells grow in an uncontrolled way in the bone marrow. The disease is very difficult to treat and is still considered incurable, and thus it is urgent to identify new therapeutic targets in the cancer cells. The research group behind ...

TROY, N.Y. -- An antioxidant found in green tea may increase levels of p53, a natural anti-cancer protein, known as the "guardian of the genome" for its ability to repair DNA damage or destroy cancerous cells. Published today in Nature Communications, a study of the direct interaction between p53 and the green tea compound, epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), points to a new target for cancer drug discovery. "Both p53 and EGCG molecules are extremely interesting. Mutations in p53 are found in over 50% of human cancer, while EGCG is the major anti-oxidant in green tea, a popular beverage worldwide," said END ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Humans aren't the only mammals that form long-term bonds with a single, special mate -- some bats, wolves, beavers, foxes and other animals do, too. But new research suggests the brain circuitry that makes love last in some species may not be the same in others. The study, appearing Feb. 12 in the journal Scientific Reports, compares monogamous and promiscuous species within a closely related group of lemurs, distant primate cousins of humans from the island Madagascar. Red-bellied lemurs and mongoose lemurs are among the few species in the lemur family tree in which male-female partners stick together year after year, working together to raise their young and defend their territory. Once bonded, pairs spend much of their waking hours grooming ...

Every year around 20 Australian children die from the incurable brain tumour, Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). The average age of diagnosis for DIPG is just seven years. There are no effective treatments, and almost all children die from the disease, usually within one year of diagnosis. A paper published today 12 Feb 2021 in the prestigious journal, Nature Communications, reveals a potential revolutionary drug combination that - in animal studies and in world first 3D models of the tumour - is "spectacularly effective in eradicating the cancer cells," according to lead researcher and paediatric oncologist Associate Professor David Ziegler, from the Children's Cancer Institute and Sydney Children's Hospital. In ...

Children treated for cancer with approaches such as chemotherapy can develop therapy-related myeloid neoplasms (a second type of cancer) with a dismal prognosis. Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have characterized the genomic abnormalities of 84 such myeloid neoplasms, with potential implications for early interventions to stop the disease. A paper detailing the work was published today in Nature Communications. The somatic (cancer) and germline (inherited) genomic alterations that drive therapy-related myeloid neoplasms in children have not been comprehensively ...

(Friday, February 12, 2021 - Toronto) -- Inhibiting a key enzyme that controls a large network of proteins important in cell division and growth paves the way for a new class of drugs that could stop glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer, from growing. Researchers at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and University of Toronto, showed that chemically inhibiting the enzyme PRMT5 can suppress the growth of glioblastoma cells. The inhibition of PRMT5 led to cell senescence, similar to what happens to cells during aging when cells lose the ability to divide and grow. Cellular senescence can also be a powerful tumour suppression mechanism, stopping ...

Space: the final frontier. What's stopping us from exploring it? Well, lots of things, but one of the major issues is space radiation, and the effects it can have on astronaut health during long voyages. A new review in the open-access journal END ...

Research over the last 20 years has shown that atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory condition of the arterial blood vessel wall. Soluble mediators such as cytokines and chemokines are pivotal players in this disease, promoting vascular inflammation. However, the development of anti-inflammatory therapeutics directed against such mediators that could prevent atherosclerosis has proven difficult, despite promising clinical studies in the recent past. Previous anti-inflammatory therapeutic strategies to prevent atherosclerosis, heart attacks, strokes, rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases have mainly been based ...

Remote sensing technology has become a vital tool for scientists over the past several decades for monitoring changes in land use, ice cover, and vegetation across the globe. Satellite imagery, however, is typically available at only coarse resolutions, allowing only for the analysis of broad trends over large areas. Remote-controlled drones are an increasingly affordable alternative for researchers working at finer scales in ecology and agriculture, but the laser-based technology used to estimate plant productivity and biomass, such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), remain prohibitively expensive. In research presented in a recently published issue of Applications in Plant Sciences, researchers ...

New research has shown that results of blood tests routinely performed by GPs everywhere contain a hidden fingerprint that can identify people silently developing potentially fatal liver cirrhosis. The researchers have developed an algorithm to detect this fingerprint that could be freely installed on any clinical computer, making this a low-cost way for GPs to carry out large scale screening using patient data they already hold. Liver cirrhosis is the second leading disease causing premature death in working-age people (after heart disease). It develops silently ...

Peer-reviewed / Observational study / People For the study, published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, researchers analysed data from the UK Biobank of 500,000 people aged 58 years on average, and found that people with higher than normal blood sugar levels were 42% more likely to experience cognitive decline over an average of four years, and were 54% more likely to develop vascular dementia over an average of eight years (although absolute rates of both cognitive decline and dementia were low). The associations remained true after other influential factors had been taken into account - including age, deprivation, smoking, BMI and whether or not participants had cardiovascular disease. People with ...

A team of scientists have measured the relative importance of the different obstacles that carbon dioxide (CO2) encounters in its voyage from the atmosphere to the interior of plant cells, where it is converted into sugars. This research leading method provides much needed information that will help to increase the yield of important food crops such as cowpea, soybean and cassava. "Our data highlights promising targets to improve the diffusion of CO2 through the leaf with the aim of boosting crop productivity," says lead author Dr Tory Clarke, who works at The Australian National University (ANU), as part of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic ...

Psychologists at the University of Bath, Cardiff, and London have developed the first ever 'mind-reading questionnaire' to assess how well people understand what others are really thinking. A new approach to 'mind-reading' has been developed by researchers at the University of Bath, Cardiff, and London to improve how well we understand what others are thinking. And it transpires that women are much better than men at putting themselves in someone else's shoes. Mind-reading, sometimes referred to in psychology as 'mentalising', is an important ability enabling us to pick-up on subtle behavioural cues that might indicate that someone we are speaking to is thinking ...

A new modelling study published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) shows that the UK's coronavirus vaccination program is already reducing daily deaths. However, reductions of hospital and intensive care (ICU) admissions will likely take several weeks longer, with large reductions seen by the end of March and continuing into April. The study is by Professor Tim Cook (Consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, Bath, UK, and Honorary Professor, School of Medicine, University of Bristol, UK) and Mr ...

Anti-retroviral drugs are a vital tool in the prevention and treatment of HIV. A new study of pregnant women in Tanzania shows that life-long antiviral treatment also seems to prevent viral transmission from mother to baby. The results of the study, which was conducted in part by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in Lancet HIV, make a promising contribution to the WHO's work with HIV prevention in low and middle-income countries. Just over eight years ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued recommendations known as Option B+ for a simpler and more effective prevention and treatment for HIV during and beyond pregnancy in low and middle-income countries. One arm of the Option B+ programme involved ensuring that pregnant women with HIV ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University used a three-model approach to trace the between-farm spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), as well as to analyze the efficacy of different control strategies in these scenarios. The approach may enable farmers to be more proactive in preventing the spread of PEDV and to optimize their efforts to control the disease. PEDV is a virus that causes high mortality rates in preweaned piglets. The virus emerged in the U.S. in 2013 and by 2014 had infected approximately 50 percent of breeding herds. PEDV is transmitted by contact with contaminated fecal matter. "We wanted to compare three different models by using actual outbreak data in order to test their efficacy," says Gustavo Machado, assistant professor of population ...

To build a universal quantum computer from fragile quantum components, effective implementation of quantum error correction (QEC) is an essential requirement and a central challenge. QEC is used in quantum computing, which has the potential to solve scientific problems beyond the scope of supercomputers, to protect quantum information from errors due to various noise. Published by the journal Nature, research co-authored by University of Massachusetts Amherst physicist Chen Wang, graduate students Jeffrey Gertler and Shruti Shirol, and postdoctoral researcher Juliang Li takes a step toward building a fault-tolerant ...

New research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business shows first evidence that watching and learning from others can help reduce bias and improve decision-making. The research, published END ...

MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher Yongxia Wu, Ph.D., identified a new target molecule in the fight against graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Bone marrow transplant, a treatment for certain blood cancers, is accompanied by potentially life-threatening GVHD in nearly 50% of patients. A January 2021 paper published in Cellular and Molecular Immunology revealed that activating a molecule called STING may be a new approach to reduce GVHD. Xue-Zhong Yu, M.D., professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, focuses on understanding the intricate immune mechanisms that regulate GVHD development and anti-tumor activity. Recently, STING (stimulator of interferon genes) has been highly studied in the context of cancer. Data from other groups has shown that STING activation ...

Irvine, CA - February 11, 2021 - Subconsciously, our bodies keep time for us through an ancient means - the circadian clock. A new University of California, Irvine-led article reviews how the clock controls various aspects of homeostasis, and how organs coordinate their function over the course of a day. "What is fascinating is that nearly every cell that makes up our organs has its own clock, and thus timing is a crucial aspect of biology," said Kevin B. Koronowski, PhD, lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in Biological Chemistry at the UCI School of Medicine. "Understanding how daily timing is integrated with function ...

A Russian physicist and his international colleagues studied a quantum point contact (QCP) between two conductors with external oscillating fields applied to the contact. They found that, for some types of contacts, an increase in the oscillation frequency above a critical value reduced the current to zero - a promising mechanism that can help create nanoelectronics components. This research supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) was published in the Physical Review B journal. A persistent trend in the modern electronics, miniaturization has spurred demand for new nano-sized devices that boast advanced performance and leverage quantum effects with electrons ...

Getting around without the need to concentrate on every step is something most of us can take for granted because our inner ears drive reflexes that make maintaining balance automatic. However, for about 1.8 million adults worldwide with bilateral vestibular hypofunction (BVH) -- loss of the inner ears' sense of balance -- walking requires constant attention to avoid a fall. Now, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have shown that they can facilitate walking, relieve dizziness and improve quality of life in patients with BVH by surgically implanting a stimulator that electrically ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The songs of fin whales can be used for seismic imaging of the oceanic crust, providing scientists a novel alternative to conventional surveying, a new study published this week in Science shows. Fin whale songs contain signals that are reflected and refracted within the crust, including the sediment and the solid rock layers beneath. These signals, recorded on seismometers on the ocean bottom, can be used to determine the thickness of the layers as well as other information relevant to seismic research, said John Nabelek, a professor in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a co-author of the paper. "People in the past have used whale calls to track whales and study whale behavior. ...

For some 15,000 years, dogs have been our hunting partners, workmates, helpers and companions. Could they also be our next allies in the fight against COVID-19? According to UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus Tommy Dickey(link is external) and his collaborator, BioScent researcher Heather Junqueira, they can. And with a review paper(link is external) published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine they have added to a small but growing consensus that trained medical scent dogs can effectively be used for screening individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus. This follows a comprehensive survey of research ...

DURHAM, N.C. - People who have a gene variant associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease also tend to have changes in the fluid around their brain and spinal cord that are detectable years before symptoms arise, according to new research from Duke Health. The work found that in people who carry the APOE4 gene variant, which is found in roughly 25 percent of the population, the cerebrospinal fluid contains lower levels of certain inflammatory molecules. This raises the possibility that these inflammatory molecules may be collecting in the brain where they may be damaging synapses, rather than floating freely in the cerebrospinal fluid. The findings, which were published online last month in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, provide a potential ...