BALTIMORE, December 11, 2014 - Insilico Medicine along with scientists from Vision Genomics and Howard University shed light on AMD disease, introducing the opportunity for eventual diagnostic and treatment options. The scientific collaboration between Vision Genomics, Inc., Howard University, and Insilico Medicine, Inc., has revealed encouraging insight on the AMD disease using an interactome analysis approach. Resources such as publicly available gene expression data, Insilico Medicine's original algorithm OncoFinderTM, and AMD MedicineTM from Vision Genomics allowed ...

How much protection the annual flu shot provides depends on how well the vaccine (which is designed based on a "best guess" for next season's flu strain) matches the actually circulating virus. However, it also depends on the strength of the immune response elicited by the vaccine. A study published on December 11th in PLOS Pathogens reports that genetic variants in a gene called IL-28B influence influenza vaccine responses. Adrian Egli, from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues started with blood samples from organ transplant patients. Such patients are ...

New circulating metabolites might allow early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. A team of scientists from Uppsala University, Karolinska Institutet and Colorado State University have identified novel lipid-derived molecules associated with future coronary heart disease events. The study published in the journal PLOS Genetics has examined the metabolic profile of blood samples from more than 3,600 individuals that have been followed-up for up to 10 years. Professor Erik Ingelsson and graduate student Andrea Ganna have used novel biochemical and bioinformatics approaches ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- An international effort involving more than 100 researchers, nine supercomputers and about 400 years of CPU time has yielded the most reliable avian tree of life yet produced, researchers report in the journal Science. The tree reflects the evolutionary relationships of 48 species of birds. The paper describing the bird family tree is one of eight articles on avian evolution published together in Science. The overall endeavor was coordinated by Erich Jarvis of Duke University; M. Thomas P. Gilbert of the Natural History Museum of Denmark; and Guojie ...

Crocodiles are the closest living relatives of the birds, sharing a common ancestor that lived around 240 million years ago and also gave rise to the dinosaurs. A new study of crocodilian genomes led by scientists at UC Santa Cruz reveals an exceptionally slow rate of genome evolution in the crocodilians (a group that includes crocodiles, caimans, alligators, and gharials). The UC Santa Cruz team used the crocodilian genomes, combined with newly published bird genomes, to reconstruct a partial genome of the common ancestor of crocodiles, birds, and dinosaurs. The study, ...

Conventional wisdom holds that changing the views of voters on divisive issues is difficult if not impossible -- and that when change does occur, it is almost always temporary. But Michael LaCour, a UCLA doctoral candidate in political science, and Donald Green, a Columbia University political science professor, have demonstrated that a single conversation can go a long way toward building lasting support for a controversial social issue. In addition -- nearly as surprisingly -- the effect tends to spill over to friends and family members. The key is putting voters ...

A new computational technique developed at The University of Texas at Austin has enabled an international consortium to produce an avian tree of life that points to the origins of various bird species. A graduate student at the university is a leading author on papers describing the new technique and sharing the consortium's findings about bird evolution in the journal Science. The results of the four-year effort -- which relied in part on supercomputers at the university's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) -- shed light on the timing of a "big bang" in bird evolution, ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - The absence of teeth or "edentulism" has evolved on multiple occasions within vertebrates including birds, turtles, and a few groups of mammals such as anteaters, baleen whales and pangolins. Where early birds are concerned, the fossil record is fragmentary. A question that has intrigued biologists is: Based on this fossil record, were teeth lost in the common ancestor of all living birds or convergently in two or more independent lineages of birds? A research team led by biologists at the University of California, Riverside and Montclair State University, ...

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 11, 2014-- It's possible to lastingly persuade conservative voters to support a controversial issue like marriage for same-sex couples--and at a greatly accelerated rate compared to their neighbors--according to groundbreaking data published in this week's issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science. The 12-month study also shows how the Los Angeles LGBT Center's voter persuasion methods reduced anti-gay prejudice and may have the potential to reduce other forms of prejudice. The independent researchers who led the study, prominent Columbia University ...

This news release is available in Danish and also Chinese on EurekAlert! Chinese. An international effort to sequence the genomes of 45 avian species has yielded the most reliable tree of life for birds to date. This new avian family tree helps to clarify how modern birds--the most species-rich class of four-limbed vertebrates on the planet--emerged rapidly from a mass extinction event that wiped out all of the dinosaurs approximately 66 million years ago. It reveals how some of the earliest bird species diverged, answering many long-standing questions about the common ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 11, 2014 - University of Utah researchers ran biochemical analysis and computer simulations of a livestock virus to discover a likely and exotic mechanism to explain the replication of related viruses such as Ebola, measles and rabies. The mechanism may be a possible target for new treatments within a decade. "This is fundamental science. It creates new targets for potential antiviral drugs in the next five to 10 years, but unfortunately would not have an impact on the current Ebola epidemic" in West Africa, says Saveez Saffarian, senior author of ...

(SALT LAKE CITY) - Examination of DNA from 21 primate species - from squirrel monkeys to humans - exposes an evolutionary war against infectious bacteria over iron that circulates in the host's bloodstream. Supported by experimental evidence, these findings, published in Science on Dec. 12, demonstrate the vital importance of an increasingly appreciated defensive strategy called nutritional immunity. "We've known about nutritional immunity for 40 years," says Matthew Barber, Ph.D., first author and postdoctoral fellow in human genetics at the University of Utah. "What ...

How birds evolved to have characteristics including feathers, flight and song is revealed with new clarity in a major study of their family tree. The international study charts a burst of evolution that took place after the mass extinction of dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. This step-change gave rise to nearly all of the species of birds that we see on the planet today - more than 10,000 varieties. The four-year project - which included researchers from the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute - decoded and compared the entire genetic fingerprint of 48 bird species. ...

Two penguin genomes have been sequenced and analyzed for the first time in the open access, open data journal GigaScience. Timely for the holiday season, the study reveals insights into how these birds have been able to adapt to the cold and hostile Antarctic environment. Antarctic penguins are subject to extremely low temperatures, high winds, and profound changes in daylight. They have developed complicated biological systems to regulate temperature and store energy for long-term fasting. Most studies have focused on the physiological and behavioral aspects of their ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- His office is filled with all sorts of bird books, but Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis didn't become an expert on the avian family tree because of any particular interest in our feathered friends. Rather, it was his fascination with how the human brain understands and reproduces speech that brought him to the birds. "We've known for many years that the singing behavior of birds is similar to speech in humans -- not identical, but similar -- and that the brain circuitry is similar, too," said Jarvis, an associate professor of neurobiology at the Duke ...

VIDEO: A microscopy system continuously measures responses to signaling chemicals in thousands of cells at a time. Click here for more information. Scientists have discovered a general principle for how cells could accurately transmit chemical signals despite high levels of noise in the system, they report in Science this week. A cell's response to outside chemical signals depends on its physiological state, which can fluctuate considerably. Amounts of different kinds ...

The entire semiconductor industry, not to mention Silicon Valley, is built on the propensity of electrons in silicon to get kicked out of their atomic shells and become free. These mobile electrons are routed and switched though transistors, carrying the digital information that characterizes our age. An international team of physicists and chemists based at the University of California, Berkeley, has for the first time taken snapshots of this ephemeral event using attosecond pulses of soft x-ray light lasting only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. While ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Where did the songbird get its song? What branch of the bird family tree is closer to the flamingo - the heron or the sparrow? These questions seem simple, but are actually difficult for geneticists to answer. A new, sophisticated statistical technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas at Austin can help researchers construct more accurate species trees detailing the lineage of genes and the relationships between species. The method, called statistical binning, was used in the Avian Phylogenetics Project, ...

This news release is available in Spanish. 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs, as we think about them, became extinct, but certain reptiles and birds survived this mass extinction. The birds that survived experienced rapid evolution and diversification. Until now, explaining the family tree of modern birds has been a difficult and controversial subject amongst scientists. Thanks to the research of an international consortium involving researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, we now have new clues about this evolution and further information ...

FORT LAUDERDALE-DAVIE, Fla. - We all know that ducks, crows, falcons and egrets are birds. A group of scientists, however, wanted to dig deeper and unlock more about how these animals are related genetically. The idea was to investigate how modern species of birds emerged and evolved after the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth. This research included work from Stephen O'Brien, Ph.D., a professor at NSU's Oceanographic Center whose main focus in genomics. Now findings from this research are being announced in several scientific publications, including Science magazine, ...

A Texas Tech University biologist led a team of more than 50 scientists who mapped the genomes of three crocodilians. By mapping these genomes, scientists may better understand the evolution of birds, which are the toothy predators' closest living relatives, said David Ray, an associate professor of biology. The team completed genomes of a crocodile, an alligator and a true gharial to complete the genomic family portrait. Their research, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, will appear Friday (Dec. 12) in the peer-reviewed journal, Science. "One of the ...

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered exactly how the malaria parasite is developing resistance towards the most important front-line drugs used to treat the disease. Malaria is a mosquito-borne parasite which affects over 60 million people worldwide and in serious cases, can be fatal. There is currently no viable vaccine for malaria while antimalarial drugs and prophylaxis are losing its efficacy with increasing drug resistance. NTU Associate Professor Zbynek Bozdech, who led an international research team from 11 different countries, ...

The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 28 papers -- eight papers in a Dec. 12 special issue of Science and 20 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed at avian.genomics.cn Scientists already knew that the birds who survived the mass extinction experienced a rapid burst of evolution. But the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity ...

New research from the University of Kent suggests that chickens and turkeys have experienced fewer gross genomic changes than other birds as they evolved from their dinosaur ancestor. Professor Darren Griffin and a team at the University's School of Biosciences have conducted research that suggests that chromosomes of the chicken and turkey lineage have undergone the fewest number of changes compared to their ancient avian ancestor, thought to be a feathered dinosaur. The Kent research is part of a study by a consortium of leading scientists into avian or bird genomes, ...

An international team of scientists has completed the largest whole genome study of a single class of animals to date. To map the tree of life for birds, the team sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird species representing all major branches of modern birds including ostrich, hummingbird, crow, duck, falcon, parrot, crane, ibis, woodpecker and eagle species. The researchers have been working on this ambitious genetic tree of life, or phylogeny, project for four years. As part of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium -- comprised of more than 200 scientists ...