When ovarian cancer spreads from the ovaries it almost always does so to a layer of fatty tissue that lines the gut. A new study has found that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on these soft tissues due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues. "What we found is that there are some cancer cells that respond to softness as opposed to stiffness," said Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering ...

Social work researchers from the University of Washington have found that among a group of active-duty Army personnel who use illicit drugs, the most abused substance is synthetic marijuana, which is harder to detect than other drugs through standard drug tests. The research will be published in the July 2014 issue of Addictive Behaviors, but is already online. Synthetic marijuana, sometimes called "Spice," is made with shredded plant material coated with chemicals that are designed to mimic THC, the psychoactive compound found naturally in marijuana. The U.S. Drug ...

SAN ANTONIO, May 8, 2014 – A new method for isolating and genome sequencing an individual malaria parasite cell has been developed by Texas Biomed researchers and their colleagues. This advance will allow scientists to improve their ability to identify the multiple types of malaria parasites infecting patients and lead to ways to best design drugs and vaccines to tackle this major global killer. Malaria remains the world's deadliest parasitic disease, killing 655,000 people in 2010. Malaria parasite infections are complex and often contain multiple different parasite genotypes ...

Single-cell genomics could provide new insight into the biology of Malaria parasites, including their virulence and levels of drug resistance, to ultimately improve treatment and control of the disease, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health. The findings are revealed in a study by researchers at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and published today in the journal Genome Research. Malaria infections commonly contain complex mixtures of Plasmodium parasites which cause the disease. These mixtures, known as multiple ...

In a study published today in F1000Research, Professor Kenneth Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong reveals the full experimental results of an attempt to replicate a controversial study published in Nature recently that suggested that bathing somatic cells in acid can reprogram them to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). With systematically collected and fully available data, Lee and his colleagues report that carefully replicating the original acid-treatment method does not induce pluripotency in two types of mouse somatic cells, including those used in ...

A tropical low pressure area known as System 90E is located a couple of hundred miles southwest of Zihuatenejo, Mexico today and was seen by NASA's Terra satellite on its way to a landfall. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of System 90E on May 7 at 18:50 UTC/ 2:50 p.m. EDT as it headed to a landfall in southwestern Mexico. The low appeared disorganized as it approached the southwestern coast of Mexico near the states of Michoacan and Guerrero. According to NOAA's National Hurricane ...

Patients whose own red blood cells are recycled and given back to them during heart surgery have healthier blood cells better able to carry oxygen where it is most needed compared to those who get transfusions of blood stored in a blood bank, according to results of a small study at Johns Hopkins. In a report for the June issue of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, the researchers say they found that the more units of banked blood a patient received, the more red cell damage they observed. The damage renders the cells less flexible and less able to squeeze through a ...

Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes account for nearly 25 percent of hereditary breast cancers and most hereditary ovarian cancers, yet a study by cancer prevention and control researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center suggests an alarmingly small amount of women who qualify for BRCA genetic counseling actually receive the services. Additionally, they found that a significant proportion of women with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer underestimate their own risk. The study, published in the April edition of the Journal of Community ...

A variant of the gene KLOTHO is known for its anti-aging effects in people fortunate enough to carry one copy. Now researchers find that it also has benefits when it comes to brain function. The variant appears to lend beneficial cognitive effects by increasing overall levels of klotho in the bloodstream and brain. What's more, the improvements in learning and memory associated with klotho elevation aren't strictly tied to aging. They do occur in aging mice, but also in young animals, according to a report published in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports on May 8th. ...

Most of us have probably felt that lasting sense of anxiety or even pain after enduring some kind of accident or injury. Now, researchers have the first evidence in any animal that there may be a very good reason for that kind of heightened sensitivity—or at least there is in the battle of squid versus fish. Squid that behave with extra vigilance after experiencing even a minor injury are more likely to live to see another day, according to a report appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 8. The findings suggest that behaviors that appear counterproductive ...

The largest metagenomic search for antibiotic resistance genes in the DNA sequences of microbial communities from around the globe has found that bacteria carrying those vexing genes turn up everywhere in nature that scientists look for them. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 8 add to evidence showing just how common and abundant those resistance genes really are in natural environments. This big-picture, ecological view on a growing healthcare concern emphasizes the important relationship between antibiotic resistance in the clinic ...

After cancer spreads, finding and destroying malignant cells that circulate in the body is usually critical to patient survival. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Chemistry & Biology have developed a new method that allows investigators to label and track single tumor cells circulating in the blood. This advance could help investigators develop a better understanding of cancer spread and how to stop it. Cancer spread, or metastasis, leads to up to 90% of cancer deaths. Investigators currently do not have the clinical capability to intervene and stop ...

The entire heart muscle in young children may hold untapped potential for regeneration, new research suggests. For decades, scientists believed that after a child's first few days of life, cardiac muscle cells did not divide. Instead, the assumption was that the heart could only grow by having the muscle cells become larger. Cracks were already appearing in that theory. But new findings in mice, scheduled for publication in Cell, provide a dramatic counterexample -- with implications for the treatment of congenital heart disorders in humans. Researchers at Emory University ...

It is widely accepted that heart muscle cells in mammals stop replicating shortly after birth, limiting the ability of the heart to repair itself after injury. A study published by Cell Press May 8th in the journal Cell now shows that heart muscle cells in mice undergo a brief proliferative burst prior to adolescence, increasing in number by about 40% to allow the heart to meet the increased circulatory needs of the body during a period of rapid growth. The findings suggest that thyroid hormone therapy could stimulate this process and enhance the heart's ability to regenerate ...

Polar bears adapted to life in cold Arctic climates in part by relying on a high-fat diet mainly consisting of seals and their blubber. In a study published by Cell Press May 8th in the journal Cell, researchers discovered that mutations in genes involved in cardiovascular function allowed polar bears to rapidly evolve the ability to consume a fatty diet without developing high rates of heart disease. Moreover, the study revealed that polar bears diverged from brown bears less than 500,000 years ago—much more recently than estimates based on previous genomic data. "In ...

Determining species diversity makes it possible to estimate the impact of human activity on marine ecosystems accurately. The environmental effects of salmon farming have been assessed, until now, by visually identifying the animals living in the marine sediment samples collected at specific distances from farming sites. A team led by Jan Pawlowski, professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, analysed this type of sediment using a technique known as "DNA barcoding" that targets certain micro-organisms. Their research, which has ...

A comparison of the genomes of polar bears and brown bears reveals that the polar bear is a much younger species than previously believed, having diverged from brown bears less than 500,000 years ago. The analysis also uncovered several genes that may be involved in the polar bears' extreme adaptations to life in the high Arctic. The species lives much of its life on sea ice, where it subsists on a blubber-rich diet of primarily marine mammals. The genes pinpointed by the study are related to fatty acid metabolism and cardiovascular function, and may explain the bear's ...

A scientific team led by the Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco has discovered that a common form of a gene already associated with long life also improves learning and memory, a finding that could have implications for treating age-related diseases like Alzheimer's. The researchers found that people who carry a single copy of the KL-VS variant of the KLOTHO gene perform better on a wide variety of cognitive tests. When the researchers modeled the effects in mice, they found it strengthened the connections between neurons that make learning possible – what is known ...

PHILADELPHIA - Ancient philosophers looked to alchemy for clues to life everlasting. Today, researchers look to their yeast. These single-celled microbes have long served as model systems for the puzzle that is the aging process, and in this week's issue of Cell Metabolism, they fill in yet another piece. The study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, identifies a new molecular circuit that controls longevity in yeast and more complex organisms and suggests a therapeutic intervention that could mimic the lifespan-enhancing effect of caloric restriction, ...

A newly identified difference between the brains of women and men with multiple sclerosis (MS) may help explain why so many more women than men get the disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. In recent years, the diagnosis of MS has increased more rapidly among women, who get the disorder nearly four times more than men. The reasons are unclear, but the new study is the first to associate a sex difference in the brain with MS. The findings appear May 8 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Studying mice and people, ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A subset of immune cells directly target colon cancers, rather than the immune system, giving the cells the aggressive properties of cancer stem cells. So finds a new study that is an international collaboration among researchers from the United States, China and Poland. "If you want to control cancer stem cells through new therapies, then you need to understand what controls the cancer stem cells," says senior study author Weiping Zou, M.D., Ph.D., Charles B. de Nancrede Professor of surgery, immunology and biology at the University of Michigan Medical ...

What is the secret to aging more slowly and living longer? Not antioxidants, apparently. Many people believe that free radicals, the sometimes-toxic molecules produced by our bodies as we process oxygen, are the culprit behind aging. Yet a number of studies in recent years have produced evidence that the opposite may be true. Now, researchers at McGill University have taken this finding a step further by showing how free radicals promote longevity in an experimental model organism, the roundworm C. elegans. Surprisingly, the team discovered that free radicals – also ...

May 8, 2014, Shenzhen, China – In a paper published in the May 8 issue of the journal Cell as the cover story, researches from BGI, University of California, University of Copenhagen and other institutes presented the first polar bear genome and their new findings about how polar bear successfully adapted to life in the high Arctic environment, and its demographic history throughout the history of its adaptation. Polar bears are at the top of the food chain, and spend most of their lifetimes on the sea ice largely within the Arctic Circle. They were well known to the ...

Hinxton, 8 May 2014 – Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have discovered that some immune cells turn themselves off by producing a steroid. The findings, published in Cell Reports, have implications for the study of cancers, autoimmune diseases and parasitic infections. If you've ever used a steroid, for example cortisone cream on eczema, you'll have seen first-hand how efficient steroids are at suppressing the immune response. Normally, when your body senses that immune cells have finished their job, ...

May 8, 2014 - If you are sending Mother's Day flowers to your mom this weekend, chances are you opted for guaranteed delivery: the promise that they will arrive by a certain time. Should the flowers not arrive in time, you will likely feel betrayed by the sender for breaking their promise. But if they arrive earlier, you likely will be no happier than if they arrive on time, according to new research. The new work suggests that we place such a high premium on keeping a promise that exceeding it confers little or no additional benefit. Whether we make them with a person ...