Like our own bodies, cells have their own skeletons called 'cytoskeletons' and are made of proteins instead of bones. These network-like structures maintain the cell's shape, provide mechanical support, and are involved in critical processes of the cell's lifecycle. The cytoskeleton is an object of intense scientific and medical research, which often requires being able to observe it directly in cells. Ideally, this would involve highly-fluorescent molecules that can bind cytoskeletal proteins with high specificity without being toxic to the cell. Publishing in Nature Methods, ...

VIDEO: In the middle of a DNA scaffold is affixed a single strand of DNA, with NAD+ tethered to the end like a ball and string. ASU Professor Han Yan refers... Click here for more information. Using molecules of DNA like an architectural scaffold, Arizona State University scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Michigan, have developed a 3-D artificial enzyme cascade that mimics an important biochemical pathway that could prove important for future biomedical ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a mutated gene common to adenosquamous carcinoma (ASC) tumors – the first known unique molecular signature for this rare, but particularly virulent, form of pancreatic cancer. The findings are published in the May 25 advance online issue of Nature Medicine. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States, with roughly 45,220 new cases diagnosed and more than 38,400 deaths annually. Both numbers are rising. ASC cases are infrequent, but ...

"Aha" moments are rare in medical research, scientists say. As rare, they add, as finding mice with Mohawk-like hairstyles. But both events happened in a lab at NYU Langone Medical Center, months after an international team of neuroscientists bred hundreds of mice with a suspect genetic mutation tied to autism spectrum disorders. Almost all the grown mice, the NYU Langone team observed, had sideways,"overgroomed" hair with a highly stylized center hairline between their ears and hardly a tuft elsewhere. Mice typically groom each other's hair. Researchers say they ...

MADISON, Wis. — Soils that formed on the Earth's surface thousands of years ago and that are now deeply buried features of vanished landscapes have been found to be rich in carbon, adding a new dimension to our planet's carbon cycle. The finding, reported today (May 25, 2014) in the journal Nature Geoscience, is significant as it suggests that deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon which could, through erosion, agriculture, deforestation, mining and other human activities, contribute to global climate change. "There is a lot of carbon at depths ...

May 25, 2014 — (Bronx, NY) — Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered a signaling pathway in cancer cells that controls their ability to invade nearby tissues in a finely orchestrated manner. The findings offer insights into the early molecular events involved in metastasis, the deadly spread of cancer cells from primary tumor to other parts of the body. The study was published today in the online edition of Nature Cell Biology. To migrate from a primary tumor, a cancer cell must first break through surrounding connective ...

HOUSTON -- Scientists have found a way to target elusive cells that suppress immune response, depleting them with peptides that spare other important cells and shrink tumors in preclinical experiments, according to a paper published online by Nature Medicine. "We've known about these cells blocking immune response for a decade, but haven't been able to shut them down for lack of an identified target," said the paper's senior author, Larry Kwak, M.D., Ph.D., chair of Lymphoma/Myeloma and director of the Center for Cancer Immunology Research at The University of Texas MD ...

The Greenish Warbler, long considered an idealized example of a single species that diverged into two as it expanded its range, has a much more checkered family history than biologists previously realized. Ring species are a continuous loop of related populations, each adapted to its local environment, with two terminal populations in the loop meeting but now unable to mate. But an in-depth genomic analysis published today in Nature by University of British Columbia researchers reveals that the Greenish Warbler's genetic migration through central Asia involved periods ...

Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streaming, we want things fast. Paul Lett and his colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute (1) specialize in producing modulated beams of light for encoding information. They haven't ...

Scientists studying brain process involved in sight have found the visual cortex also uses information gleaned from the ears as well as the eyes when viewing the world. They suggest this auditory input enables the visual system to predict incoming information and could confer a survival advantage. Professor Lars Muckli, of the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: "Sounds create visual imagery, mental images, and automatic projections. "So, for example, if you are in a street and you hear the sound of an ...

A brain imaging study shows that patients with chronic fatigue syndrome may have reduced responses, compared with healthy controls, in a region of the brain connected with fatigue. The findings suggest that chronic fatigue syndrome is associated with changes in the brain involving brain circuits that regulate motor activity and motivation. Compared with healthy controls, patients with chronic fatigue syndrome had less activation of the basal ganglia, as measured by fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). This reduction of basal ganglia activity was also linked with ...

The emerald ash borer (Agrilus plantipenis), a recent insect immigrant to North America carried in with the wooden packing material of imported goods, is projected to cause over a billion dollars in damages annually over the next decade. International standards now require expensive fumigation or heat treatment of wood pallets and crates to prevent the inadvertent import of new wood boring insect pests in shipping materials. Preventative treatment is worthwhile when the cumulative damages of widening infestations are considered, report scientists in Ecological Society ...

BETHESDA, MD – May 23, 2014 – A new approach to studying microbes in the wild will allow scientists to sequence the genomes of individual species from complex mixtures. It marks a big advance for understanding the enormous diversity of microbial communities —including the human microbiome. The work is described in an article published May 22 in Early Online form in the journal G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, published by the Genetics Society of America. "This new method will allow us to discover many currently unknown microbial species that can't be grown in the lab, while ...

Shortly after dawn broke in the Eastern Pacific Ocean this morning, May 23, Tropical Depression 1E organized and strengthened into the first tropical storm of the season: Amanda NOAA's GOES-West satellite provided a visible image of Amanda on May 23 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT/8 a.m. PDT). The GOES imagery showed strong thunderstorms in the northern and western quadrants and is indicative of a better structure in the banding of thunderstorms around the low-level center of circulation. By that time, Amanda's maximum sustained winds had increased to 40 mph (65 kph). Tropical-storm-force ...

University of Adelaide research has for the first time confirmed that women who eat a poor diet before they become pregnant are around 50% more likely to have a preterm birth than those on a healthy diet. Researchers at the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute investigated the dietary patterns of more than 300 South Australian women to better understand their eating habits before pregnancy. It's the first study of its kind to assess women's diet prior to conception and its association with outcomes at birth. The results, published in The Journal of ...

System 92B appears to have weakened in the last day as an infrared look at the tropical low pressure area's cloud temperatures have shown. NASA's AIRS instrument is an infrared "eye in the sky" that recently flew over the weaker tropical low pressure area. On May 22 at 19:29 UTC/3:29 p.m. EDT, NASA's Aqua satellite passed over System 92B and infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument and the SSMIS instrument saw patchy deep convection flaring and dissipating over the western portion of a low-level circulation center. Earlier on May 22, the areas ...

A new chemotherapy drug being investigated for its potency against two types of cancer was found by scientists at Houston Methodist and seven other institutions to be effective in about one-third of the 58 patients who participated in a phase I study. The drug, alisertib or MLN8237, inhibits the enzyme aurora A kinase, which is known to be very active during cell division. The present study, published in the journal Investigational New Drugs, looks at the safety, tolerability, and preliminary success of alisertib in treating non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and chronic lymphocytic ...

DALLAS – May 23, 2014 – A microRNA cluster believed to be important for suppressing colon cancer has been found to play a critical role in wound healing in the intestine, UT Southwestern cancer researchers have found. The findings, first discovered in mice and later reproduced in human cells, could provide a fresh avenue for investigating chronic digestive diseases and for potentially repairing damage in these and other disease or injury settings. "We identified a novel role for microRNAs in regulating wound healing in the intestine. This finding has important ...

Like a bullet wrapped in a full metal jacket, a high-velocity hydrogen cloud hurtling toward the Milky Way appears to be encased in a shell of dark matter, according to a new analysis of data from the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Astronomers believe that without this protective shell, the high-velocity cloud (HVC) known as the Smith Cloud would have disintegrated long ago when it first collided with the disk of our Galaxy. If confirmed by further observations, a halo of dark matter could mean that the Smith Cloud is actually ...

The Slide Fire is located in Oak Creek Canyon just north of Slide Rock State Park and burning northward, up the canyon into places such as West Fork and Harding Point. Currently it has burned 7,500 acres and is 5% contained. The fire originated just about 4 to 5 miles north of Sedona, just north of Slide Rock State Park on May 20, and was human caused. Investigations regarding the cause are ongoing. Crews made good progress overnight conducting burnout operations along the north and east flanks of the fire. Several small spot fires were contained through the evening ...

We all want to feel like we're free-thinking individuals, but there's nothing like the power of social pressure to sway an opinion. New research suggests that people do change their own personal judgments so that they fall in line with the group norm, but the change only seems to last about 3 days. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This is a photo of a figure standing out from the crowd."Our findings suggest that exposure to others' opinions does indeed change our own private opinions — but it doesn't ...

Word-of-mouth marketing is recognized as a powerful route from long-tail sales to blockbuster, whether one is talking about the latest fishy ice cream flavor or a Hollywood romantic comedy. In the age of social media and online networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, the potential for spreading the word could mean the difference between consumers seeing a product as the best thing since sliced bread or the most rotten of tomatoes. Chong Oh, Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, has analyzed ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Graphene's promise as a material for new kinds of electronic devices, among other uses, has led researchers around the world to study the material in search of new applications. But one of the biggest limitations to wider use of the strong, lightweight, highly conductive material has been the hurdle of fabrication on an industrial scale. Initial work with the carbon material, which forms an atomic-scale mesh and is just a single atom thick, has relied on the use of tiny flakes, typically obtained by quickly removing a piece of sticky tape from a block ...

Hollow capsules that have a selectively permeable shell are promising candidates as tiny containers for molecules, particles or bubbles, and are becoming increasingly important in a wide variety of applications. But making these kinds of capsules with more than one kind of substance on their shells has been challenging – until now. In a article in the latest edition of Nature Communications, NTNU researcher Jon Otto Fossum and Paul Dommersnes from the University of Paris, Diderot, were part of a team that showed that both Janus and more advanced patchy capsules can ...

The bright yellow fields of oilseed rape are a familiar sight at this time of year, but for scientists what lies beneath is just as exciting. Researchers at the Institute of Food Research are looking at how to turn straw from oilseed rape into biofuel. Preliminary findings are pointing at ways the process could be made more efficient, as well as how the straw itself could be improved. Straw from crops such as wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production. Currently the UK produces around 12 million ...