The stresses that come with aging, chemotherapy treatments, and environmental exposures all threaten fertility. But what if there were a way to preserve women's limited egg supply? Researchers reporting on studies conducted in frog and mouse eggs in the Cell Press journal Molecular Cell on October 3rd may have found a way. The findings come at an important time when many women are waiting longer and longer to have children, renewing interest in the development of strategies to preserve oocytes—immature egg cells. "Our work provides insight into how oocyte viability ...

The ability to make induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from mature cells in the body holds great potential for improved drug screening, disease modeling, and medical treatments for numerous conditions. Establishing well-characterized panels of iPSC lines that reflect the diversity of the human population and include samples from patients with a wide range of diseases will be key to tapping into the potential of iPSCs. In the October 3 issue of the Cell Press journal Cell Stem Cell, leading experts in the field publish several opinion pieces on emerging issues related ...

Autophagy, a key cellular auto-cleaning mechanism, mediates the formation of amyloid beta plaques, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. It might be a potential drug target for the treatment of the disease, concludes new research from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. The study sheds light on the metabolism of amyloid beta, and its role in neurodegeneration and memory loss. In a study published today in the journal Cell Reports, Drs. Per Nilsson, Takaomi Saido and their team show for the first time using transgenic mice that a lack of autophagy in neurons ...

Wealth inequality can encourage people to cooperate when they would otherwise have no incentive to do so, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. "In many groups and societies, the temptation to defect is high, which means that cheaters are much better off than cooperators," says IIASA researcher Ulf Dieckmann, who worked on the study along with IIASA researcher Ádám Kun. For example, he says, if a train ticket is very expensive and the probability that cheaters are caught is low, people will be tempted to free-ride without purchasing a ticket. Likewise, ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- A multidisciplinary team led by a geneticist and psychiatrist from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's (CSHL) Stanley Institute for Cognitive Genomics today publish a paper providing a glimpse of both the tremendous power and the current limitations of what is sometimes called "precision medicine." Precision medicine is an approach to diagnosis and treatment that tailors therapeutic care to individuals in a highly specific manner, and which brings to bear powerful new technologies that have not yet made it into the mainstream of clinical medicine, ...

Exposure to common air pollutants found in diesel exhaust pollution can affect the ability of honeybees to recognise floral odours, new University of Southampton research shows. Honeybees use floral odours to help locate, identify and recognise the flowers from which they forage. The Southampton team, led by Dr Tracey Newman and Professor Guy Poppy, found that diesel exhaust fumes change the profile of flora odour. They say that these changes may affect honeybees' foraging efficiency and, ultimately, could affect pollination and thus global food security. Published ...

Boston, MA – For decades, there has been a significant effort led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing. Despite this work, new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) finds only incremental improvement in antibiotic prescribing for adults with acute bronchitis and sore throat. These findings were presented at IDWeek on October 3, 2013 and the sore throat data was published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. "We know that antibiotic prescribing, particularly to patients who are not likely ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 3, 2013) – Whitehead Institute researchers have redefined the function of a gene whose mutation causes Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental autism spectrum disorder. This new research offers an improved understanding of the defects found in the neurons of Rett syndrome patients and could lead to novel therapies for the disease. "The action of the MECP2 protein is just the opposite of how it was held for the past 15 years," says Whitehead Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch, who is also a professor of biology at MIT. "It was thought that this protein ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A tiny but unexpected change to a segment of RNA in a single-cell organism looks a lot like a mistake, but is instead a change to the genetic information that is essential to the organism's survival. Scientists have discovered this RNA "edit" in Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in Africa and Chagas disease in Latin America. Though the organism is a model system for this work, the finding could lead to a new drug target to fight the parasite if higher species don't share this genetic behavior. Some of the organism's genetic ...

NEW YORK (October 3, 2013) -- Using powerful genetic sequencing technology, a team of investigators, led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, scanned the genome of hundreds of individuals, and discovered those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were more likely to have gene deletions than were people without the disorder. That means those individuals -- seven percent of the study group -- had one copy of one or more genes when they should have had two. The scientists further report, in the American Journal of Human Genetics, that ...

Often deadly "triple-negative" breast cancers might be effectively treated in many cases with a drug that targets a previously unknown vulnerability in the tumors, according to a UC San Francisco researcher who described her discovery in a study published online October 3, 2013 in the journal Cancer Cell. UCSF researcher Luika Timmerman, PhD, an investigator in the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, found that many cell lines obtained from triple-negative breast cancer are especially dependent on cystine, one of the 20 amino acids that are the building ...

JUPITER, FL, October 3, 2013 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified a new drug candidate for an inherited form of cancer with no known cure. The new study showed the drug candidate—known as FRAX97—slowed the proliferation and progression of tumor cells in animal models of Neurofibromatosis type 2. This inherited type of cancer, caused by mutations in the anti-tumor gene NF2, leads to tumors of the auditory nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain. The new compound, originally developed to treat neurodegenerative ...

Portland, Ore., USA (October 3, 2013) --- Lactating cats not only increase their total calorie consumption, they also significantly alter the make-up of their diet to meet the demands of feeding a litter, research from the WALTHAM® Centre for Pet Nutrition has shown. The research provides intriguing insights into cats' feeding behaviour and strong evidence that they are able to adapt their macronutrient intake, i.e. their intake of protein, fat and carbohydrate, to meet their physiological requirements. "It's no surprise that, just like humans, cats require more energy ...

A new picture of how the nervous system interacts with the immune system to cause the itch and inflammation associated with eczema, a chronic skin disease, could lead to new therapies for the condition, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists. Some 10 percent of the population suffers from eczema, or atopic dermatitis, at some point in their lives, but there are no cures or even good treatments for it. Symptoms range from dry, flaky and itchy skin to flaming red rashes, and in severe cases, particularly in children, the disease often progresses to ...

When developing new drugs, monitoring cellular responses to candidate compounds is essential for assessing their efficacy and safety. Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies report a new method to monitor and quantify the activity of gene promoters during the response to a drug, using the advanced gene expression analysis method CAGE followed by single-molecule sequencing. This research paves the way to a more precise analysis of cellular responses to drugs, at the level of individual promoters. The study is published this week in the journal ...

Every day we recognize friends, family, and co-workers from afar -- even before we can distinctly see a face. New research reveals that when facial features are difficult to make out, we readily use information about someone's body to identify them -- even when we don't know we're doing so. "Psychologists and computer scientists have concentrated almost exclusively on the role of the face in person recognition," explains lead researcher, Allyson Rice of the University of Texas at Dallas. "But our results show that the body can also provide important and useful identity ...

A study concerning the evolution of mitochondrial DNA, performed by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), has allowed to determine the frequency and pattern of heteroplasmy in the complete mitochondrial genome using a representative sample of the European population. This phenomenon, which indicates the presence of different mitochondrial DNA types in a cell or an individual, can be found in more than half of the population. The data obtained indicates that many of the newly arising mutations found never reach fixation at the population level due ...

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have discovered big differences in the variability of eating habits among pigs. The newly published study showed that for some (pigs with certain genetic variants) overeating was normal behavior and for a particular group of pigs there was clear evidence they were genetically programmed to eat more food than others. The study was led by professor Haja Kadarmideen and is the first study in the world looking at pig to human comparative genetic mapping to reveal key genes on the human genome that are known to be involved in human obesity. ...

Think of a frequently used noun or verb in our language. Try to count how many times you have uttered it in the last two hours. Now, do the same with the article "the". The language we speak is not only made of content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, for instance) but also of lots of words that provide a support to them (articles, prepositions, etc.) that are used much more frequently than the first (function words, or functors). Despite the huge variability of known languages, language scientists were able to divide them roughly into two main categories: the languages ...

False killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) are one of the least studied species of ocean dolphin, but new light has been cast on their behavior by a team of marine scientists from New Zealand. The research, published in Marine Mammal Science, reveals how a population off the coast of New Zealand has developed a relationship with bottlenose dolphins to defend themselves from predation. The 17-year study revealed that all 61 individuals in the area were linked in a single social network, while 88% of identified individuals were re-sighted in the same area over several ...

The more accurately we can diagnose a disease, the greater the chance that the patient will survive. That is why many researchers are working to improve the quality of the diagnostic process. Researchers at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen have discovered a method that will make the process faster, cheaper and more accurate. This is possible, because they are combining advanced tools used in physics for research in biology at nanoscale, two scientific disciplines usually very distant from each other. Many diseases can be diagnosed using so-called biomarkers. ...

A regular eating pattern may protect adolescents from obesity, according to a Finnish population-based study with more than 4,000 participants. When eating five meals – breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks – a day, even those with a genetic predisposition to obesity had no higher body mass index (BMI) than their controls. The collection of the data on the study population began prenatally, and the participants were followed up until the age of 16. The aim was to identify early-life risk factors associated with obesity, to investigate the association between meal frequencies, ...

Agriculture is one of the most insatiable consumers of dwindling water resources around the world. And food production will need to increase by about 70% over the next 35 years to meet the needs of a growing population. Crops aren't creating the only demands; agriculture will face competition for water from cities, industries, and recreation. With limited water and the increasing number of people depending on it, water security is tenuous. But integrated water management plans using "blue," "green," and "gray" water can increase water security. What do these colors mean ...

New research reports that liver transplant recipients who receive substance abuse treatment before and after transplantation have much lower alcohol relapse rates than those untreated or only treated prior to transplantation. A second study determines that continued alcohol abuse following liver transplantation decreases graft survival, further highlighting the importance of preventing alcohol relapse. Both studies are published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society. ...

FROSTBURG, MD -- Where a stream ends is clear, but where it begins can be more difficult to discern. Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have developed a new method to solve this problem, resulting in a new map of the Potomac River watershed stream network that significantly improves the information needed for assessing the impact of urbanization on aquatic ecosystems. "For the first time, we have an accurate representation of where streams once flowed through major urban areas of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and where streams ...