LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a greatly improved technique for making amino acids not found in nature. These "unnatural" amino acids traditionally have been very difficult to synthesize, but are sought after by the pharmaceutical industry for their potential medical uses. "This new technique offers a very quick way to prepare unnatural amino acids, many of which are drug candidates or building blocks for peptide drugs," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry. Yu's team has reported ...

America's current energy boom may take a new direction thanks to the discovery of a new way to turn raw natural gas into upgraded liquid alcohol fuel. In the March 14 issue of Science magazine, chemists from Brigham Young University and The Scripps Research Institute detail a process that could reduce dependence on petroleum. The most unexpected breakthrough in the paper was that ordinary "main group" metals like thallium and lead can trigger the conversion of natural gas to liquid alcohol. The research teams saw in experiments that natural gas to alcohol conversion ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered an important mechanism underlying sensory feedback that guides balance and limb movements. The finding, which the TSRI team uncovered in fruit flies, centers on a gene and a type of nerve cell required for detection of leg-joint angles. "These cells resemble human nerve cells that innervate joints," said team leader Professor Boaz Cook, who is an assistant professor at TSRI, "and they encode joint-angle information in the same way." If the findings can be fully replicated ...

Scientists at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, with collaborators at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois, have unveiled a new way in which plants perceive pathogens to activate immunity. They also show how pathogens inhibit the mechanism to cause disease. It was previously only associated with other processes in mammalian cells. When plants detect microbial molecules, they trigger immune responses to prevent disease. Although several plant immune receptors for these microbial molecules are known, how they are activated once the microbe is recognised ...

Numbers and data can be critical tools in bringing complex issues into crisp focus. The understanding of diseases, for example, benefits from algorithms that help monitor their spread. But without context, a number may just be a number, or worse, misleading. "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis" is published in the journal Science, funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Specifically, the authors examine Google's data-aggregating tool Google Flu Trend (GFT), which was designed to provide real-time monitoring of flu cases around ...

Most of us already imagine the tropics as a place of diversity—a lush region of the globe teeming with a wide variety of exotic plants and animals. But for researchers Andrew Forbes and Marty Condon, there's even more diversity than meets the eye. In a paper published in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, Forbes and Condon report the discovery of extraordinary diversity and specialization in the tropics. The paper builds upon previous research conducted by Condon, who discovered surprising diversity while researching plant species in South America. Later, she, ...

Carnivore management is not just a numbers game, Virginia Tech wildlife scientists assert in response to an article in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Science that urged "minimum population densities be maintained for persistence of large carnivores, biodiversity, and ecosystem structure." "This type of approach may fail in social carnivore species," said Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. "Predator management is incredibly complex and we need to be extremely cautious ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Every cell in our body has exactly the same DNA, yet every cell is different. A cell's identity is determined by the subset of genes that it activates. But how does a cell know which genes to turn off and which to turn on? While the genetic code carried in our DNA provides instructions for cells to manufacture specific proteins, it is a second code that determines which genes are in fact activated in particular cell types. This second code is carried by proteins that attach to DNA. The code-carrying proteins are called histones. Today, researchers ...

Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere to its rocky interior and back again. Now Stanford scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how topography, rock compositions and the movement of water through a landscape affects this vital recycling process. Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth's clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, ...

New York, NY – The protein GM-CSF plays a critical role in maintaining immune tolerance in the gut, with defects in the protein increasing the susceptibility to inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), according to a new mouse study by a team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. IBD is a severe intestinal disease characterized by chronic intestinal inflammation that results from a dysregulated immune response to microbes and food antigens. Writing in the peer reviewed journal Science published online March 13, 2014, the research team writes that this ...

(Garrison, NY) From genetic and genomic testing to new techniques in human assisted reproduction, various technologies are providing parents with more of a say about the children they have and "stirring the pot of 'designer baby' concerns," writes Thomas H. Murray, President Emeritus of The Hastings Center, in a commentary in Science. Murray calls for a national conversation about how much discretion would-be parents should have. "Preventing a lethal disease is one thing; choosing the traits we desire is quite another," he writes. He discusses public hearings two weeks ...

VIDEO: To create supersharp images of their cage-shaped DNA polyhedral, the scientists used DNA-PAINT, a microscopy method that uses short strands of DNA (yellow) labeled with a fluorescent chemical (green) to... Click here for more information. BOSTON, March 13, 2014 – Move over, nanotechnologists, and make room for the biggest of the small. Scientists at the Harvard's Wyss Institute have built a set of self-assembling DNA cages one-tenth as wide as a bacterium. The structures ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – About three out of four older Americans have multiple chronic health conditions, and more than 20 percent of them are being treated with drugs that work at odds with each other – the medication being used for one condition can actually make the other condition worse. This approach of treating conditions "one at a time" even if the treatments might conflict with one another is common in medicine, experts say, in part because little information exists to guide practitioners in how to consider this problem, weigh alternatives and identify different options. One ...

Whether you're a Major League outfielder chasing down a hard-hit ball or a lesser mortal navigating a busy city sidewalk, it pays to keep a close watch on your surroundings when walking or running. Now, new research by UC San Francisco neuroscientists suggests that the body may get help in these fast-changing situations from a specialized brain circuit that causes visual system neurons to fire more strongly during locomotion. There has been a great deal of research on changes among different brain states during sleep, but the new findings, reported in the March 13 issue ...

A new study investigating racial disparities in birth outcomes shows that contrary to some theories Vitamin D is unlikely to play a role in differences in preterm birth and low birth weight between African-Americans and whites. "For years there has been this hypothesis that African-Americans have worse birth outcomes because they have more melanin in their skin which reflects the sun and therefore lowers levels of Vitamin D," said study author Zaneta Thayer, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver . "But in examining the relationship ...

VIDEO: This animation of NOAA's GOES satellite data shows the progression of the major winter storm over the US Mid-Atlantic and northeastern US on March 12 and 13. Click here for more information. Three days of satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite were compiled into an animation that showed the progression of the storm system that drastically changed temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern U.S. from spring-like warmth to the bitter cold of winter. A ...

MADISON — A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has detected a higher rate of seizures among children with autism who were fed infant formula containing soy protein rather than milk protein. The study found excess seizures among girls and in the total sample of 1,949 children. The soy-seizure link reached borderline significance among boys, who comprised 87 percent of the children described in the database under study. Seizures — caused by uncontrolled electrical currents in the brain — occur in many neurological disorders including epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers report they have discovered direct genetic evidence that a family of genes, called MicroRNA-34 (miR-34), are bona fide tumor suppressors. The study is published in the journal Cell Reports, March 13. Previous research at Cornell and elsewhere has shown that another gene, called p53, acts to positively regulate miR-34. Mutations of p53 have been implicated in half of all cancers. Interestingly, miR-34 is also frequently silenced by mechanisms other than p53 in many cancers, including those with p53 mutations. The researchers ...

In biology, scientists typically conduct experiments first, and then develop mathematical or computer models afterward to show how the collected data fit with theory. In his work, Rob Phillips flips that practice on its head. The Caltech biophysicist tackles questions in cellular biology as a physicist would—by first formulating a model that can make predictions and then testing those predictions. Using this strategy, Phillips and his group have recently developed a mathematical model that accounts for the way genes compete with each other for the proteins that regulate ...

WASHINGTON, DC, March 13, 2014 — When it comes to Oscars and some other Hollywood movie awards, who your friends are affects whether you win, according to a new study. "Sociological theory suggests that the process of 'making it' in any field depends not only on individual merit, but also on the kind of audience that makes the judgments," said co-author Paul D. Allison, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "Specifically, our study found that peers are more likely to favor award candidates who are highly embedded in the field, whereas critics will not ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In the complex genomic and molecular conspiracy that gives rise to ovarian cancer, what if researchers have been missing a whole set of suspects because they've been hiding in plain sight? That's the argument made by Brown University biologists in a new paper that combines evidence from original research and prior studies to raise new suspicions about a set of proteins that assist in regulating gene expression. Scientists need such new leads in their investigation of ovarian cancer, the most deadly reproductive cancer. Mortality has ...

Using a cutting-edge research technique, UCLA researchers have reconstructed the temperature history of a region that plays a major role in determining climate around the world. The findings, published online Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience, will help inform scientists about the processes influencing global warming in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. The study analyzes how much temperatures have increased in the region near Indonesia, and how ocean temperatures affect nearby tropical glaciers in Papua New Guinea and Borneo. Researchers also evaluated ...

The brain drain of educated workers is still felt most severely in China's central and western provinces, since most knowledge-based industries are generally concentrated in its large coastal cities. However, low-educated migrant workers increasingly find jobs in their home provinces in the central and western regions because of changing economic and government policy. So says Ye Liu and his colleagues of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong and The University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, who carried out a systematic analysis of migration trends in China ...

New York, NY – A protein that normally protects cells from environmental stresses has been shown to interact Marburg virus VP24, allowing the deadly Marburg virus to live longer and replicate better, according to a cell culture study led by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The investigators say that deciphering the molecular details of how Marburg virus and the host protein interact may help in developing inhibitors of the virus. Results from the study are published online March 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports. Infections with Marburg ...

Some commonly used drugs that combat aches and pains, fever, and inflammation are also thought to have the ability to kill bacteria. New research appearing online on March 13 in the Cell Press journal Chemistry & Biology reveals that these drugs, better known as NSAIDs, act on bacteria in a way that is fundamentally different from current antibiotics. The discovery could open up new strategies for fighting drug-resistant infections and "superbugs." "We discovered that some anti-inflammatory drugs used in human and veterinary medicine have weak antibiotic activity and ...