Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have for the first time identified a gene driving the development of pernicious adipose tissue in humans. The findings imply, which are published in the scientific journal Cell Metabolism, that the gene may constitute a risk factor promoting the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Adipose tissue can expand in two ways: by increasing the size and/or the number of the fat cells. It is well established that subjects with few but large fat cells, so-called hypertrophy, display an increased risk of developing ...

Scientists have developed a sophisticated computer modelling simulation to explore how cells of the fruit fly react to changes in the environment. The research, published today in the science journal Cell, is part of an on-going study at The Universities of Manchester and Sheffield that is investigating how external environmental factors impact on health and disease. The model shows how cells of the fruit fly communicate with each other during its development. Dr Martin Baron, who led the research, said: "The work is a really nice example of researchers from different ...

HOUSTON – Fibrous tissue long suspected of making pancreatic cancer worse actually supports an immune attack that slows tumor progression but cannot overcome it, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the journal Cancer Cell. "This supportive tissue that's abundant in pancreatic cancer tumors is not a traitor as we thought but rather an ally that is fighting to the end. It's a losing battle with cancer cells, but progression is much faster without their constant resistance," said study senior author Raghu Kalluri, Ph.D., M.D., chair ...

Blocking a pain receptor in mice not only extends their lifespan, it also gives them a more youthful metabolism, including an improved insulin response that allows them to deal better with high blood sugar. "We think that blocking this pain receptor and pathway could be very, very useful not only for relieving pain, but for improving lifespan and metabolic health, and in particular for treating diabetes and obesity in humans," said Andrew Dillin, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of a new paper describing ...

Duke University researchers have found an antibody that simultaneously blocks the sensations of pain and itching in studies with mice. The new antibody works by targeting the voltage-sensitive sodium channels in the cell membrane of neurons. The results appear online on May 22 in Cell. Voltage-sensitive sodium channels control the flow of sodium ions through the neuron's membrane. These channels open and close by responding to the electric current or action potential of the cells. One particular type of sodium channel, called the Nav1.7 subtype, is responsible for ...

To guarantee efficient use of nutrients, cells have systems that permit them to capture and transport the available nutrient molecules to their interior. But if several nutrients are available, cells can select those that are of most interest and discard undesired molecules. Inside cells, nutrients are conducted to the mitochondria, the specialized cell organelles in which nutrients are combusted to release the energy held in their chemical bonds. Both sugars (glucose) and fats (fatty acids) are 'burned' in mitochondria, but these organelles need to adjust their molecular ...

The world has great expectations that stem cell research one day will revolutionize medicine. But in order to exploit the potential of stem cells, we need to understand how their development is regulated. Now researchers from University of Southern Denmark offer new insight. Stem cells are cells that are able to develop into different specialized cell types with specific functions in the body. In adult humans these cells play an important role in tissue regeneration. The potential to act as repair cells can be exploited for disease control of e.g. Parkinson's or diabetes, ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — New research represents a significant change in the understanding of how pancreatic cancer grows – and how it might be defeated. Unlike other types of cancer, pancreatic cancer produces a lot of scar tissue and inflammation. For years, researchers believed that this scar tissue, called desmoplasia, helped the tumor grow, and they've designed treatments to attack this. But new research led by Andrew D. Rhim, M.D., from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, finds that when you eliminate desmoplasia, tumors grow even more quickly and ...

The way a woman feels about tackling everyday physical activities, including exercise, may be a predictor of how much weight she'll retain years after childbirth says a Michigan State University professor. James Pivarnik, a professor of kinesiology and epidemiology at MSU, co-led a study that followed 56 women during pregnancy and measured their physical activity levels, along with barriers to exercise and the ability to overcome them. Six years later, the research team followed up with more than half of the participants and found that the women who considered themselves ...

Over the past several decades, neurostimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have gradually gained favour in the public eye. In a new report, published yesterday in the prestigious scientific journal Neuron, IRCM ethics experts raise important questions about the rising tide of tDCS coverage in the media, while regulatory action is lacking and ethical issues need to be addressed. TDCS is a non-invasive form of neurostimulation, in which constant, low current is delivered directly to areas of the brain using small electrodes. Originally ...

22 May 2014, Paris, France: The value of analysing published clinical trials and the benefit of informed discussion were highlighted yesterday when the ACCOAST trial data were discussed in a new session format—Will this trial change my practice?— at EuroPCR 2014. ACCOAST trial results demonstrate that pre-treatment with prasugrel in NSTEMI patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is inferior to treatment with the drug after angiography. Several other trials are also being scrutinised in the same format, which ends with a discussion with the audience ...

A pathway to the design of even more effective versions of the powerful anti-cancer drug Taxol has been opened with the most detailed look ever at the assembly and disassembly of microtubules, tiny fibers of tubulin protein that form the cytoskeletons of living cells and play a crucial role in mitosis. Through a combination of high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and new methodology for image analysis and structure interpretation, researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have produced ...

What do sled dogs and cell clusters have in common? According to research by UC Santa Barbara's Denise Montell, they both travel in groups and need a leader to make sure they all follow in the same direction. Montell, Duggan Professor of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology, and colleagues worked on three independent projects involving E-cadherin, a protein found in epithelial cells throughout the body. The researchers used fruit-fly ovaries to uncover the role played by E-cadherin in collective cell migration. Their findings are reported today in the journal ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Melanin — and specifically, the form called eumelanin — is the primary pigment that gives humans the coloring of their skin, hair, and eyes. It protects the body from the hazards of ultraviolet and other radiation that can damage cells and lead to skin cancer, but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery. Now researchers at MIT and other institutions have solved that mystery, potentially opening the way for the development of synthetic materials that could have ...

The nation's obesity epidemic is striking all groups of Americans, affecting those with more education and those with less education, as well as all ethnic groups, according to a new analysis that challenges prevailing assumptions about the reasons why the nation is getting heavier. While some differences in weight are evident between groups based on race and education levels, all Americans have been getting fatter at about the same rate for the past 25 years, even as the nation saw increases in leisure time, increased availability of fruit and vegetables, and increases ...

Residents of the Italian island of Sardinia are known for their longevity. Now, a new study also shows that elderly Sardinians are less depressed and generally are in a better mental frame of mind than peers living elsewhere. The study, led by Maria Chiara Fastame and Maria Pietronilla Penna of the University of Cagliari in Italy and Paul Hitchcott from the Southampton Solent University in UK, is published in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life. Various tests to measure the mental state and capacity of elderly people were performed on 191 cognitively ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 22, 2014—To make up for insufficient amounts of SMN protein, the cause of the inherited neuromuscular disease spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), researchers have successfully delivered a replacement SMN1 gene directly to the spinal cords of animal models of SMA. A new study demonstrating that enough copies of the SMN1 gene can be delivered to the spinal cord motor neurons to extend the survival of the treated animals is published in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the ...

Crowding has notoriously negative effects at large size scales, blamed for everything from human disease and depression to community resource shortages. But relatively little is known about the influence of crowding at the cellular level. A new JILA study shows that a crowded environment has dramatic effects on individual biomolecules. In the first data on the underlying dynamics (or kinetics)of crowded single biomolecules , reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,* JILA researchers found that crowding leads to a 35-fold increase in the folding rate ...

This gift from science just keeps on giving. Measurements taken at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) show why a material already known to be good at separating components of natural gas also can do something trickier: help convert one chemical to another, a process called catalysis. The discovery is a rare example of a laboratory-made material easily performing a task that biology usually requires a complex series of steps to accomplish. The material is a metal-organic framework (MOF), one of a class of substances whose porosity, high surface area ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory, have found that a particular species of quantum dots that weren't commonly thought to blink, do. So what? Well, although the blinks are short—on the order of nanoseconds to milliseconds—even brief fluctuations can result in efficiency losses that could cause trouble for using quantum dots to generate photons that move information around inside a quantum computer or between nodes of a future high-security internet based on quantum telecommunications. Beyond ...

Philadelphia, PA—Opinion formation in a large population is influenced by both endogenous factors, such as interaction with one's peers—in-person and via social media—as well as exogenous factors, such as the media, of which mainstream media is one of the most influential factors. For example, according to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2006, after the introduction and expansion of Fox News in the United States between 1996 and 2000, an estimated 3-28% of the audience was persuaded to vote Republican. In a recent paper published in ...

A chip-scale device that both produces and detects a specialized gas used in biomedical analysis and medical imaging has been built and demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in Nature Communications,* the new microfluidic chip produces polarized (or magnetized) xenon gas and then detects even the faintest magnetic signals from the gas. Polarized xenon—with the atoms' nuclear "spins" aligned like bar magnets in the same direction—can be dissolved in liquids and used to detect the presence of certain molecules. A chemical interaction ...

Analysis of a manganese-based crystal by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced the first clear picture of its molecular structure. The findings could help explain the magnetic and electronic behavior of the whole family of crystals, many of which have potential for use in batteries. The family of crystals it belongs to has no formal name, but it has three branches, each of which is built around manganese, cobalt or iron—transition metals that can have different magnetic ...

A new remedy has been found to tackle the difficulty of controlling layered nanomaterials. Control can be improved by simply bending the material. The mechanism was observed by Academy Research Fellow Pekka Koskinen from the Nanoscience Center of the University of Jyväskylä together with his colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. Bending decreases interaction between layers, making the material merely a stack of independent atomic layers. The group investigated the van der Waals nanomaterials which consist of stacked and loosely bound two-dimensional ...

New research led by the University of Kent shows that individuals who have consumed moderate amounts of alcohol in social situations are likely to view risky situations with greater caution when considering them as part of a group. The research, by psychologists from the University of Kent and the University of East Anglia, produced the first evidence found outside of laboratory conditions that being in a group can reduce some effects of alcohol consumption. The findings could lead to the design of new interventions designed to promote safer recreational drinking. Researchers ...