A code of silence in acute myeloid leukemia The development of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is associated with a variety of genetic changes. Some of these alterations are epigenetic, wherein the sequence of the genes is unchanged, but chemical modifications to the DNA alters gene expression. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Daniel Tenen at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that a transcriptional regulator known as C/EBPG was highly expressed in a subset of AML samples that had an epigenetically silenced C/EBPA ...

Huntington disease (HD) is an incurable neurodegenerative disease caused by a mutation in the huntingtin gene (htt). Though most of the symptoms of HD are neurological, the mutant HTT protein is expressed in non-neural cells as well. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Paul Muchowski at the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Franscisco examined the role of immune cells in HD. Immune cells known as microglia, which were isolated from the brains of HD mice, as well as immune cells from the peripheral blood were found to be defective ...

The development of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is associated with a variety of genetic changes. Some of these alterations are epigenetic, wherein the sequence of the genes is unchanged, but chemical modifications to the DNA alter gene expression. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Daniel Tenen at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that a transcriptional regulator known as C/EBPG was highly expressed in a subset of AML samples that had an epigenetically silenced C/EBPA gene. By blocking the epigenetic modification of ...

Many of the world's most unfamiliar species are just sitting around on museum shelves collecting dust. That's according to a report in the November 20th issue of the Cell Press journal Current Biology showing that it takes more than 20 years on average before a species, newly collected, will be described. It's a measure the researchers refer to as the species' "shelf life," and that long shelf life means that any conservation attempts for unknown, threatened species could come much too late. The problem, the researchers say, is due to a lack of experts and of the funding ...

According to a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal), people who became ill during the Walkerton, Ontario, Escherichia coli O157:H7outbreak were not at greater risk of heart disease or stroke 10 years later. E. coli O157:H7 is a common cause of 'food poisoning." This bacterium most recently caused the outbreak involving beef from XL foods (Alberta) in September 2012, and was the major cause of illness during the large Walkerton E. coli outbreak in May 2000. In the United States, there are 63 000 infections each year, with 12 major outbreaks since 2006. ...

The commitment of Canadian premiers to lower generic drug prices is a major change in how the country prices generic drugs, and government should learn from past attempts, states an article published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Generic drug prices are higher in Canada than in other industrialized countries. The authors argue that the premiers' call for a national bulk purchasing program, made earlier in 2012, is a positive step for Canadians. "The joint commitment from Canada's premiers to use coordinated bulk purchasing to lower these prices is ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2012 — Scientists today are describing a revolutionary new way to use sunlight to produce steam and other vapors without heating an entire container of fluid to the boiling point. The advance, reported in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal ACS Nano, has potential applications, especially in the poverty-stricken areas of the developing world, that include inexpensive, compact devices for purification of drinking water, sterilization of medical instruments and sanitizing sewage. "This research opens up a revolutionary new application of nanoparticles ...

Is there a link between the risk of breast cancer and the working environment? A study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health provides further evidence on this previously neglected research topic, confirming that certain occupations do pose a higher risk of breast cancer than others, particularly those that expose the worker to potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters. Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer diagnosis among women in industrialized countries, and North American rates are among the highest in the world. Endocrine-disrupting ...

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 19, 2012 – More than half of all retired people aged 65 and over report sleeping at least 7.5 hours per night, and between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7:30 a.m., contrary to commonly held assumptions that most elderly go to bed early and have trouble sleeping through the night, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Sleep and Chronobiology Center (SCC) and University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR). This new study, supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, was conducted over five years and is among ...

Mosquitos have the remarkable ability to fly in clear skies as well as in rain, shrugging off impacts from raindrops more than 50 times their body mass. But just like modern aircraft, mosquitos also are grounded when the fog thickens. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology present their findings at the 65th meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, Nov. 18 - 20, in San Diego, Calif. "Raindrop and fog impacts affect mosquitoes quite differently," said Georgia Tech researcher Andrew Dickerson. "From a mosquito's perspective, ...

A new approach to invisibility cloaking may one day be used at sea to shield floating objects – such as oil rigs and ships – from rough waves. Unlike most other cloaking techniques that rely on transformation optics, this one is based on the influence of the ocean floor's topography on the various "layers" of ocean water. At the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting, being held November 18-20, 2012, in San Diego, Calif., Reza Alam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will describe ...

Owls have the uncanny ability to fly silently, relying on specialized plumage to reduce noise so they can hunt in acoustic stealth. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, England, are studying the owl's wing structure to better understand how it mitigates noise so they can apply that information to the design of conventional aircraft. They present their findings at the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, held Nov. 18 – 20, in San Diego, Calif. "Many owl species have developed specialized plumage to effectively eliminate the aerodynamic ...

Sound waves are commonly used in applications ranging from ultrasound imaging to hyperthermia therapy, in which high temperatures are induced, for example, in tumors to destroy them. In 2010, researchers at Caltech led by Chiara Daraio, a professor of aeronautics and applied physics, developed a nonlinear acoustic lens that can focus high-amplitude pressure pulses into compact "sound bullets." In that initial work, the scientists demonstrated how sound bullets form in solids. Now, they have done themselves one better, creating a device that can form and control those bullets ...

November 19, 2012, Shenzhen, China – An international research team led by Nanjing Agricultural University and BGI, has completed the first genomic sequence of pear by an approach using the combination of BAC-by-BAC strategy and next-gen sequencing. The pear genome not only provides an invaluable new resource for breeding improvement of this important crop, but also sheds new light on the genome evolution and other genome-wide comparative studies. The results were published online in Genome Research. As one of the oldest fruit crops, pear has more than 3,000 years of cultivation ...

It is hypothesized that cocoons attached to any material were transported by air, eg by NATO aircraft, after which the moths found their favourite hostplant commonly planted. The finding of an unknown small moth by Dutch amateur moth hunter Hans Huisman in his backyard lead to the discovery that the American Oak skeletonizer (Bucculatrix ainsliella) is invading North West Europe on planted Northern Red oaks (Quercus rubra), a North American tree. "The finding is unusual", says Erik J van Nieukerken of Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Leiden, Netherlands), "because until ...

These are some of the results of a report for the World Bank, conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics in Berlin. The poorest in the world are those that will be hit hardest, making development without climate policy almost impossible, the researchers conclude. "The planetary machinery tends to be jumpy, this is to respond disproportionately to disruptions that come with the manmade greenhouse effect," PIK's director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber points out. "If we venture far beyond the 2-degree guardrail, towards 4 degrees, ...

VIB researchers from UGent and Vrije Universiteit Brussel , together with a team of the firm Oxyrane have developed a new technology that can lead to a more efficient and possibly also cheaper therapy for diseases such as Pompe disease. Oxyrane will now start developing a clinical program for this therapy in Pompe disease. Nico Callewaert (VIB-UGent): "By combining natural processes and proteins of two microbes and a plant we have improved the technology to produce enzymes that patients with metabolic disorders can't produce themselves. We played with the sugar structures ...

The answer is yes. Finnish researchers have developed a triumphant solution for predicting responses of breast cancer cells to a set of cancer drugs. The prediction is based on the genomic profiles of the cancer cells. Harnessing genomic profiles of cells in choosing the best treatment is considered the holy grail of personalised medicine. The team led by Professor Samuel Kaski from Helsinki institute of Information Technology (HIIT), a joint research centre of Aalto University and University of Helsinki, Finland, presented its winning solution at the DREAM 2012 conference ...

Male tree frogs like to 'see what they're getting' when they select females for mating, according to a new study by Dr. Michael Reichert from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US. His work, which is one of the first to test the importance of vision on male mating behaviors in a nocturnal anuran (frog or toad), is published online in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Animals display a number of courtship behaviors and are able to modulate these behaviors depending on the likelihood of mating. For example, displaying males may increase the ...

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows, that a technique for measuring bone density called digital X-ray radiogrammetry (or DXR) used on standard hand radiographs can help to identify patients with a higher risk of hip fracture. The researchers believe that DXR, which is fully comparable with other, more costly methods, can be used preventively to identify people in the risk zone for osteoporosis – a disease estimated to effect some 200 million women worldwide. Each year, approximately 1.7 million hip fractures occur worldwide (about 18,000 only in Sweden), ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton are pioneering a technique to predict when an ecosystem is likely to collapse, which may also have potential for foretelling crises in agriculture, fisheries or even social systems. The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse. Head of Geography at Southampton, Professor John Dearing ...

A large-scale international study involving French researchers from the Inserm-Institut Pasteur Lille-Université Lille Nord de France "Public health and molecular epidemiology of ageing-related diseases" joint research unit led by Philippe Amouyel, has just discovered a gene for susceptibility to a rare disease that causes susceptibility to a common one, Alzheimer's disease, providing evidence of the heterogeneous aetiology of Alzheimer's disease. This whole-exome sequencing approach is explained in detail in The New England Journal of Medicine dated 14 November 2012. ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Could the emergency room be a good place to spot undiagnosed eating disorders among teens, and help steer them to treatment? A new study from the University of Michigan suggests that could be the case. Researchers screened more than 940 teens and young adults aged 14 years to 20 years for eating disorders, as part of their visit to the U-M Emergency Department for any non-psychiatric reason. They found that 16 percent – more than one in every 6 – had indications of an eating disorder. Those that did were also much more likely to also show signs ...

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are helping deployed American troops protect themselves against sand flies, which are major pests in Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East. Sand flies are vectors of Leishmania parasites that cause leishmaniasis, a devastating disease for which there is no vaccine or medication. People who are bitten by infected sand flies do not know whether they have the disease until it becomes apparent three or four months later. Symptoms include permanent skin disfigurement and sometimes severe organ damage. At the Agricultural ...

A new tool for neuroscientists delivers a thousand pinpricks of light to a chunk of gray matter smaller than a sugar cube. The new fiber-optic device, created by biologists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, is the first tool that can deliver precise points of light to a 3-D section of living brain tissue. The work is a step forward for a relatively new but promising technique that uses gene therapy to turn individual brain cells on and off with light. Scientists can use the new 3-D "light switch" to better understand how the ...