Vancouver, BC - Today the International Cooperation to Sequence the Atlantic Salmon Genome (ICSASG) announced completion of a fully mapped and openly accessible salmon genome. This reference genome will provide crucial information to fish managers to improve the production and sustainability of aquaculture operations, and address challenges around conservation of wild stocks, preservation of at-risk fish populations and environmental sustainability. This breakthrough was announced at the International Conference on Integrative Salmonid Biology (ICISB) being held in Vancouver ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – Babies born 32 to 36 weeks into gestation may have smaller brains and other brain abnormalities that could lead to long-term developmental problems, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. Much of the existing knowledge on preterm birth and brain development has been drawn from studies of individuals born very preterm, or less than 32 weeks into gestation at birth. For the new study, researchers in Australia focused on moderate and late preterm (MLPT) babies —those born between 32 weeks, zero days, and 36 weeks, six days, ...

WASHINGTON, DC – June 10, 2014 - Scientists believe they have an explanation for the axiom that stress, emotional shock, or overexertion may trigger heart attacks in vulnerable people. Hormones released during these events appear to cause bacterial biofilms on arterial walls to disperse, allowing plaque deposits to rupture into the bloodstream, according to research published in published today in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "Our hypothesis fitted with the observation that heart attack and stroke often occur following ...

PHILADELPHIA, PA (June 9, 2014)—There's much to learn from the recent release of unprecedented amounts of data from the nation's second largest health insurer, Medicare, but only if interpreted cautiously, write two doctors at Fox Chase Cancer Center in the June 9 online edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine. In April, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the most detailed data in its history, related to $77 billion worth of physician billings to Medicare. In its analysis of the data, The New York Times showed that only a small percentage ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Children with heart disease are exposed to low levels of radiation during X-rays, which do not significantly raise their lifetime cancer risk. However, children who undergo repeated complex imaging tests that deliver higher doses of radiation may have a slightly increased lifetime risk of cancer, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The findings, published June 9, 2014, in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, represent the largest study of cumulative radiation doses in children with heart disease and associated predictions of lifetime ...

Researchers are a step closer to establishing the link between a protein with a split personality and type 1 diabetes. New research, published today in the journal PNAS, shows how a protein, called GAD65, changes its shape when it turns itself on and off. Curiously, this characteristic may also link it to type 1 diabetes. In the human brain, GAD65 performs an essential role: it makes 'neurotransmitters' - chemicals that pass messages between brain cells. GAD65 is also found in the pancreas. Previous studies linked it to type 1 diabetes because the body makes antibodies ...

(New York – June 9, 2014) -- A protein may be the key to maintaining the health of aging blood stem cells, according to work by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai recently published online in Stem Cell Reports. Human adults keep stem cell pools on hand in key tissues, including the blood. These stem cells can become replacement cells for those lost to wear and tear. But as the blood stem cells age, their ability to regenerate blood declines, potentially contributing to anemia and the risk of cancers like acute myeloid leukemia and immune deficiency. ...

VIDEO: This shows 3-D ortho-rotation of leaf mesophyll cells. Micrographs were collected by milling fixed tissue accompanied by SEM imaging using FIB-SEM. The complete videos published with the article are available... Click here for more information. Plant cells are beginning to look a lot different to Dr. A. Bruce Cahoon and his colleagues at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). They've adopted a new approach that combines the precision of an ion beam with the imaging ...

Needle biopsy, the standard of care radiological procedure for diagnosing breast cancer, is underused with too many patients undergoing the more invasive, excisional biopsy to detect their disease, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, also finds that patients are often influenced by surgeons to undergo the unnecessary surgery -- a decision that's costly and can negatively impact their diagnosis and treatment. A needle biopsy is a non-surgical procedure typically performed ...

LEBANON, NH – When women are choosing a contraceptive, health care providers should be aware that the things they want to discuss may differ from what women want to hear, according to a survey published in the recent issue of the journal Contraception. Most of the information women receive about contraceptives focuses heavily on the effectiveness in preventing pregnancy, but this information was ranked fifth in importance by women, according to the study conducted by researchers at Dartmouth College. The researchers conducted an online survey of 417 women, aged 15-45, ...

Clinical trial evaluates ex vivo cultured cord blood Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a rich source of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) that can be used for bone marrow transplantation; however, UCB transplantation is hampered by low numbers of HSPCs per donation, which delays engraftment and immune reconstitution. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Mitchell Horwitz and colleagues at Duke University Medical Center conducted a phase I clinical trial to test the long term engraftment capability of UCB HSPCs that were expanded ex vivo for ...

BOSTON – As elite soldiers of the body's immune response, B cells serve as a vast standing army ready to recognize and destroy invading antigens, including infections and cancer cells. To do so, each new B cell comes equipped with its own highly specialized weapon, a unique antibody protein that selectively binds to specific parts of the antigen. The key to this specialization is the antigen-binding region that tailors each B cell to a particular antigen, determining whether B cells survive boot camp and are selected for maturation and survival, or wash out and die. Now, ...

Your first response to an infectious agent or antigen ordinarily takes about a week, and is relatively weak. However, if your immune system encounters that antigen a second time, the so-called memory response is rapid, powerful, and very effective. Now, a team of researchers at The Wistar Institute offers evidence that a protein, called Foxp1, is a key component of these antibody responses. Manipulating this protein's activity, they say, could provide a useful pathway to boosting antibody responses to treat infectious diseases, for example, or suppressing them to treat ...

The Academy of Radiology Research reported in the current issue of Nature Biotechnology (Volume 32, Issue 6) that patent output from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is vital to understanding which various areas of science are contributing most to America's innovation economy. The report, "Patents as Proxies: NIH Hubs of Innovation," confirms an increased economic value of NIH patents as compared to private sector patents, as well as meaningful differences in the rate and quality of invention across different research and development (R&D) investments. "The Academy ...

Four of the most common mosquito pesticides used along the east and Gulf coasts show little risk to juvenile hard clams and oysters, according to a NOAA study. However, the study, published in the on-line journal Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, also determined that lower oxygen levels in the water, known as hypoxia, and increased acidification actually increased how toxic some of the pesticides were. Such climate variables should be considered when using these pesticides in the coastal zone, the study concluded. "What we found is that larval oysters ...

DETROIT – Researchers have found that antiviral therapy may be successful in preventing hepatitis B virus from developing into the most common form of liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). That was the finding of a study published in the May issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Investigators from Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa., and Kaiser Permanente in Honolulu, Hawaii and Portland, Ore. participated in the study, along with investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Helping farmers around the globe apply more-precise amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer can help combat climate change. In a new study published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michigan State University researchers provide an improved prediction of nitrogen fertilizer's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural fields. The study uses data from around the world to show that emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas produced in the soil following nitrogen addition, rise faster than previously expected ...

SAN DIEGO (June 6, 2014) — Humans and corals are about as different from one another as living creatures get, but a new finding reveals that in one important way, they are more similar than anyone ever realized. A biologist at San Diego State University has discovered they share the same biomechanical pathway responsible for triggering cellular self-destruction. That might sound scary, but killing off defective cells is essential to keeping an organism healthy. The finding will help biologists advance their understanding of the early evolution of multicellular life, ...

Neuroscientists agree that abuse of drugs hijacks circuits in the brain that are crucial for decision-making, but society as a whole tends to stigmatize addicted people for lacking self-control. Slowly but steadily, scientists say, they are making important progress in changing the perception of addiction as they identify new therapeutic interventions that could render addiction into the equivalent of a manageable disease like diabetes. A group of addiction researchers, for one, recently recommended to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, part of the United Nations Office ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Staph infections that become resistant to multiple antibiotics don't happen because the bacteria themselves adapt to the drugs, but because of a kind of genetic parasite they carry called a plasmid that helps its host survive the antibiotics. Plasmids are rings of bare DNA containing a handful of genes that are essentially freeloaders, borrowing most of what they need to live from their bacterial host. The plasmids copy themselves and go along for the ride when the bacteria divide to copy themselves. A team from Duke and the University of Sydney in ...

URBANA, Ill. – Is sleep one of your most important family values? A new University of Illinois study suggests that it should be, reporting that more parental sleep is related to more child sleep, which is related to decreased child obesity. "Parents should make being well rested a family value and a priority. Sleep routines in a family affect all the members of the household, not just children; we know that parents won't get a good night's sleep unless and until their preschool children are sleeping," said Barbara H. Fiese, director of the U of I's Family Resiliency Center ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The state of Mato Grosso is the epicenter of an agricultural revolution in Brazil. During the last 15 years, expansion of agriculture in the state has helped Brazil become one of the world's top producers of soy, corn, cotton, and other staple crops. Despite the increase in production, the rate at which Amazon forestland in the state was cleared to make room for new farmland slowed significantly in the second half of the last decade. Much of the credit for slowing deforestation has been given to government policies and intervention, ...

VIDEO: UC Davis researchers found that the pattern of electrical activity in the brain immediately before making a decision can predict the choice made. This video shows how these experiments are... Click here for more information. Our ability to make choices — and sometimes mistakes — might arise from random fluctuations in the brain's background electrical noise, according to a recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. "How ...

"Liking" a page on the social networking site Facebook is a new form of civic engagement and humanitarian support, so concludes research published in the International Journal of Web Based Communities. According to the paper's authors social motives and an emotional response underpinned users' inclination to like, or follow, a page, rather than their simply seeking information and news. Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Ida Maria Haugstveit of Scandinavian research organization SINTEF in Oslo, Norway, surveyed more than 400 Facebook users about their habits on the site and their ...

The days of self-assembling nanoparticles taking hours to form a film over a microscopic-sized wafer are over. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have devised a technique whereby self-assembling nanoparticle arrays can form a highly ordered thin film over macroscopic distances in one minute. Ting Xu, a polymer scientist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, led a study in which supramolecules based on block copolymers were combined with gold nanoparticles to create nanocomposites that ...