(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– It's been more than 50 years since scientists discovered that the single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila has seven sexes. But in all that time, they've never known how each cell's sex, or "mating type," is determined. Now they do. By identifying Tetrahymena's long-unknown mating-type genes, a team of UC Santa Barbara biologists, with research colleagues at the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and at the J. Craig Venter Institute, also uncovered the unusual process of DNA rearrangements required for sex ...

Individuals who had taken a type of drug commonly used to treat Type 2 diabetes showed abnormalities in the pancreas, including cell proliferation, that may be associated with an increased risk of neuroendocrine tumors, according to a new study by researchers from UCLA and the University of Florida. Their findings were published online March 22 in the journal Diabetes. The researchers, from the Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center at UCLA and the Diabetes Center at the University of Florida, found that cell mass was increased approximately 40 percent in the pancreases ...

Bunk beds and baby change tables are among the hidden dangers around the home causing serious injury and death to Queensland children. In the 2013 Consumer product-related injuries in Queensland children report, prepared by QUT's Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q), more than 475,000 Queensland children sustained injuries requiring emergency department treatment between 2004 and 2011. The lead author of the report, QUT's Dr Kirsten McKenzie, said consumer products were a significant cause of child injury requiring treatment in emergency ...

The genome of the mountain pine beetle – the insect that has devastated B.C.'s lodgepole pine forests – has been decoded by researchers at the University of British Columbia and Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. This is a first for the mountain pine beetle and only the second beetle genome ever sequenced. The first was the red flour beetle, a pest of stored grains. The genome is described in a study published today in the journal Genome Biology. "We know a lot about what the beetles do," says Christopher Keeling, a research associate in Prof. Joerg Bohlmann's ...

Research from the University of Cincinnati just published in the March issue of the Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management measures the impact of brownfields on nearby residential property values in the City of Cincinnati. (Brownfields are abandoned business or industrial sites with either potential or proven on-site pollutants.) In an article titled "Using Spatial Regression to Estimate Property Tax Discounts from Proximity to Brownfields: A Tool for Local Policy Making," researchers Oana Mihaescu, a former UC regional development planning doctoral ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center have identified new DNA sequences associated with breast cancer -- the most common cancer among women, with an average risk of developing the disease of 10 percent -- and ovarian cancer, the most common cause of death from gynecological cancers in the U.S. The findings, which appear in three studies in the journals Plos Genetics and Nature Genetics, will help reveal the underlying causes of these diseases and help researchers build better risk models to support new prevention strategies. In the first study, ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Association for Cancer Research released its second Annual Report on Cancer Survivorship in the United States in advance of the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, which will be held in Washington, D.C., April 6-10. The report, published in the AACR's journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, shows that as of January 2012, there were approximately 13.7 million cancer survivors in the United States, a number that is expected to rise by 31 percent to 18 million by 2022. "The increase in the number of survivors will be due primarily to ...

More than 80 genetic ’spelling mistakes’ that can increase the risk of breast, prostate and ovarian cancer have been found in a large, international research study within the framework of the EU Network COGS. For the first time, the researchers also have a relatively clear picture of the total number of genetic alterations that can be linked to these cancers. Ultimately the researchers hope to be able to calculate the individual risk of cancer, to better understand how these cancers develop and to be able to generate new treatments. The main findings are published in ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center have identified a novel gene that can contribute to a woman's susceptibility for developing ovarian cancer. Researchers identified the gene, called HNF1B, through large-scale analysis of more than 16,000 women with ovarian cancer and more than 26,000 healthy women. Results of the study are published in the current issue of the journal Nature Communications. The study is one of 13 papers to be published simultaneously in five journals by the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), an international ...

An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has found new evidence that links faster 'biological' ageing to the risk of developing several age-related diseases - including heart disease, multiple sclerosis and various cancers. The study involved scientists in 14 centres across 8 countries, working as part of the ENGAGE Consortium (list of research teams is give below). The research is published online today (27th March) in the journal Nature Genetics. The project studied a feature of chromosomes called telomeres. Telomeres sit on the end ...

VIDEO: This video is Dr. Merabet's article as it appears in JoVE. Click here for more information. On March 27th JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) will publish a new video article by Dr. Lotfi Merabet showing how researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School have developed a virtual gaming environment to help blind individuals improve navigation skills and develop a cognitive spatial map of unfamiliar ...

Tropical rainforests are known for their high biodiversity of countless species, many of them unknown and not named by scientists yet. A large proportion of this undiscovered life on earth is formed by insects, especially beetles. German researchers Alexander Riedel (Natural History Museum Karlsruhe) and Michael Balke (Zoological State Collection Munich), know this well, being experts for faunas of remote tropical countries such as the wilderness of New Guinea. Now they came across a special case, the weevil genus Trigonopterus which is truly "hyperdiverse". Hundreds ...

The Universe is an old neighbourhood -- roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient -- some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old (eso0425). Nevertheless, there is still a lot of action: new objects form and others are destroyed. In this image, you can see some of the newcomers, the young stars forming the cluster NGC 2547. But, how young are these cosmic youngsters really? Although their exact ages remain uncertain, astronomers estimate that NGC 2547's stars range from 20 to 35 million years old. That doesn't sound all that young, ...

In collaboration with an international research team, University of Copenhagen researchers have for the first time mapped telomerase, an enzyme which has a kind of rejuvenating effect on normal cell ageing. The findings have just been published in Nature Genetics and are a step forward in the fight against cancer. Mapping the cellular fountain of youth – telomerase. This is one of the results of a major research project involving more than 1,000 researchers worldwide, four years of hard work, DKK 55 million from the EU and blood samples from more than 200,000 people. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- An international research collaboration has found five new regions of the human genome that are linked to increased risks for developing ovarian cancer. Duke Medicine researchers played a leading role analyzing genetic information from more than 40,000 women. The findings are published in four studies, two appearing in the journal Nature Communications and two in Nature Genetics on March 27, 2013. The research is being published as part of a coordinated release of new data from the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), an international ...

SCIENTISTS at the University of York have discovered the driving force behind the development of prostate cancer. Their research, published in Nature Communications today (Wednesday)* and funded by the charity Yorkshire Cancer Research, reveals the existence of a cancer inducing DNA re-alignment in stem cells taken from human prostate cancers. This opens the way to the development of drugs that target the stem cells, leading to more effective therapies that work against the root cause of the disease. Professor Norman Maitland, Director of the YCR Cancer Research ...

After eons of wandering in the dark, primates developed highly acute, three-color vision that permitted them to shift to daytime living, a new Dartmouth College study suggests. The findings challenge the prevailing view that trichromatic color vision, a hallmark of primate evolution, evolved only after they started getting up with the sun, a shift that gave rise to anthropoid (higher) primates, which, in turn, gave rise to the human lineage. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The authors based their findings ...

Two new studies have highlighted a negative impact on bees' ability to learn following exposure to a combination of pesticides commonly used in agriculture. The researchers found that the pesticides, used in the research at levels shown to occur in the wild, could interfere with the learning circuits in the bee's brain. They also found that bees exposed to combined pesticides were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. In the study published today (27th March 2013) in Nature Communications, the University of ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women in India are more likely to get prenatal care when pregnant with boys, according to groundbreaking research that has implications for girls' health and survival. The study by Leah Lakdawala of Michigan State University and Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, suggests sex discrimination begins in the womb in male-dominated societies. "It paints a pretty dire picture of what's happening," said Lakdawala, MSU assistant professor of economics. In studying the national health-survey data of more than 30,000 Indians, ...

Almost all foodstuffs contain the genetic material of those animal and plant species that were used in their preparation. Scientists at the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Genetic Security Research and Consulting at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a novel screening procedure that provides for highly sensitive, quantifiable analysis of animal, plant, and microbial substances present in foodstuffs. For this, the researchers have adapted the latest techniques of DNA sequencing, which are otherwise currently employed in human genetics to unravel the ...

Working with an international consortium conducting research on breast, ovarian and prostate cancer among 200,000 people, Professor Jacques Simard, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Oncogenetics at Laval University, was actively involved in the discovery of DNA "spelling mistakes" linked to breast cancer. These mistakes – known as genetic variations – are directly involved in the risk of developing breast cancer. The research was part of an international study on an unprecedented scale performed by the largest international consortia, the Collaborative Oncological ...

Bonn, Germany 27 March 2013 – In diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's endogenous proteins accumulate in the brain, eventually leading to the death of nerve cells. These deposits, which consist of abnormally formed proteins, are supposed to migrate between interconnected areas of the brain, thereby contributing to the development of the illness. Now, a new laboratory study by scientists from Germany and the US shows that certain protein particles are indeed capable of multiplying and spreading from one cell to the next. The investigation was conducted by researchers ...

For around 50 million years, placodonts populated the flat coastal regions of the Tethys Ocean, in modern day Europe and China. The most distinctive feature of these dinosaurs was their teeth: The upper jaw had two rows of flattened teeth – one on the palate and one on the jawbone – while the lower jaw only had one set of teeth ideal for crushing shellfish and crustaceans. The evolutionary origins of these placodonts remained unclear. However, a new find in a 246-million-year-old sediment layer now sheds light on the origin and phylogenetic development of the placodonts. ...

Researchers from Lund University, Yale University and the University of Oxford have been able to give an answer to why cuckolded males in many species still provide paternal care. When the conditions are right, this strategy is actually the most successful. In many species males put a lot of effort into caring for offspring that are not their own. At first glance this makes no sense at all because natural selection should design males to only care for offspring that carry their genes. However, males are much more astute than we might think and maximise their care according ...

New research into ageing processes, based on modern genetic techniques, confirms theoretical expectations about the correlation between reproduction and lifespan. Studies of birds reveal that those that have offspring later in life and have fewer broods live longer. And the decisive factor is telomeres, shows research from The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes. The length of telomeres influences how long an individual lives. Telomeres start off at a certain length, become shorter each time a cell divides, ...