Michael Mengel, a pathology researcher with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, has found a new way to analyze biopsies from heart transplant patients by looking at their genes. This allows him to make an early prediction whether the transplant is working. This is extremely important in heart transplant patients because a successful outcome depends completely on doing a biopsy of the heart tissue and prescribing treatments if necessary. In other organs transplants, doctors can use other measurements. It's hoped the new technology and process developed in the Faculty ...

The seeds that you plant in your backyard garden next spring — and farmers sow in their fields — may have a guardian angel that helps them sprout, stay healthy, and grow to yield bountiful harvests. It's a thin coating of chemicals termed a "seed treatment" that can encourage seeds to germinate earlier in the season, resist insects and diseases, and convey other advantages. These new seed defenders are the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Business Editor Melody Voith describes a boom ...

CHICAGO --- We all know that living a stressful lifestyle can take its toll, making us age faster and making us more susceptible to the cold going around the office. The same appears to be true of neurons in the brain. According to a new Northwestern Medicine study published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature, dopamine-releasing neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra lead a lifestyle that requires lots of energy, creating stress that could lead to the neurons' premature death. Their death causes Parkinson's disease. "Why this small group of neurons ...

Fear is an adaptive response, essential to the survival of many species. This behavioural adaptation may be innate but can also be a consequence of conditioning, during the course of which an animal learns that a particular stimulus precedes an unpleasant event. There is a large amount of data indicating that the amygdala, a particular structure in the brain, is strongly involved during the learning of "conditioned" fear. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown. Now, research involving several Swiss and German teams and a researcher ...

(Garrison, NY) Organizations that seek to provide health care, food, and other services to people held in drug detention centers in developing countries often face ethical dilemmas: Are they doing more good than harm? Are they helping detainees or legitimizing a corrupt system and ultimately building its capacity to detain and abuse more people? Such dilemmas are explored in an article coauthored by Nancy Berlinger and Michael Gusmano, research scholars at The Hastings Center, along with Roxanne Saucier and Daniel Wolfe of the Open Society Institute, and Nicholas Thomson ...

DALLAS – Nov. 11, 2010 – New findings by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center suggest that serotonin – a brain chemical known to help regulate emotion, mood and sleep – might also have anti-diabetic properties. The findings, appearing online this week in Nature Neuroscience, also offer a potential explanation for why individuals prescribed certain kinds of anti-psychotic drugs that affect serotonin signaling sometimes have problems with their metabolism, including weight gain and the development of diabetes. "In this paper, we describe a circuit in the brain ...

The November/December issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences explores the current state of our knowledge of natural selection in plants. "Plants were crucially important to Darwin's development of the theory of natural selection (six of his books were on plants)," writes Jeffrey Conner, a biologist at Michigan State University and guest editor of the issue. "Plants are still crucially important to the study of natural selection in the field." The issue features reviews and original research articles that explore multiple aspects of this complex topic. ...

PASADENA, Calif.—The eerie music in the movie theater swells; the roller coaster crests and begins its descent; something goes bump in the night. Suddenly, you're scared: your heart thumps, your stomach clenches, your throat tightens, your muscles freeze you in place. But fear doesn't come from your heart, your stomach, your throat, or your muscles. Fear begins in your brain, and it is there—specifically in an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala—that it is controlled, processed, and let out of the gate to kick off the rest of the fear response. In this week's ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When a foreign object such as a catheter enters the body, bacteria may not only invade it but also organize into a slick coating — a biofilm — that is highly resistant to antibiotics. Like sophisticated organized crime rings, biofilms cannot be defeated by a basic approach of conventional means. Instead doctors and drug developers need sophisticated new intelligence that reveals the key players in the network and how they operate. New research led by biologists at Brown University provides exactly that dossier on some key proteins in ...

MADISON, WI November 8, 2010 -- Conversion of sorghum grass to ethanol has increased with the interest in renewable fuel sources. Researchers at Iowa State University examined 12 varieties of sorghum grass grown in single and double cropping systems. The experiment was designed to test the efficiency of double cropping sorghum grass to increase its yield for biofuel production. The author of the report, Ben Goff, found that using sorghum from a single-cropping system was more effective for the production of ethanol. Since most of the ethanol currently produced in the ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – There may be many similarities between the importance of large predators in marine and terrestrial environments, researchers concluded in a recent study, which examined the interactions between wolves and elk in the United States, as well as sharks and dugongs in Australia. In each case, the major predators help control the populations of their prey, scientists said. But through what's been called the "ecology of fear" they also affect the behavior of the prey, with ripple impacts on other aspects of the ecosystem and an ecological significance that ...

AURORA, Colo. (Nov. 10, 2010) – New research released today takes a look at birth outcomes and maternal smoking, building urgency for more states and cities to join the nationwide smoke-free trend that has accelerated in recent years. According to the new data, strong smoke-free policies can improve fetal outcomes by significantly reducing the prevalence of maternal smoking. The study, which was presented today at the American Public Health Association's 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Denver, compared maternal smoking prevalence in one Colorado city where a smoking ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. —A diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is not much better than a death sentence, given a survival rate averaging 4 to 6 years as the disease robs its victim of the ability to breathe. But researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered a receptor in the immune system that may serve as a marker for a rapidly progressing form of the disease, which causes the body to produce excess fibrous tissue in the lungs. More than just signaling which patients have the more aggressive form of IPF – a disease that claims about as many lives each year ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – In modern culture, it is not considered socially acceptable for married people to have extramarital sexual partners. However, in some Amazonian cultures, extramarital sexual affairs were common, and people believed that when a woman became pregnant, each of her sexual partners would be considered part-biological father. Now, a new University of Missouri study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that up to 70 percent of Amazonian cultures may have believed in the principle of multiple paternity. "In these cultures, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The genes we possess not only determine the color of our eyes and hair and how our bodies grow, they might also influence the changes that occur in tumors when we develop cancer. A study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) suggests that our normal genetic background – the genetic variations that we inherit – contributes to the kinds of DNA changes that occur in tumor cells as cancer develops. The researchers compared multiple ...

A novel project set in a rural community near Rochester, N.Y., to screen elderly people for unmet needs showed that, indeed, there is a great opportunity to match older adults with professional assistance. This new model of care for rural-dwelling adults is described this month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The University of Rochester Medical Center, Livingston County Department of Health and Office for the Aging, and the Genesee Valley Health Partnership collaborated to create this program, called Livingston Help for Seniors. In one instance, ...

Despite lack of evidence about bed rest's effectiveness, doctors annually prescribe it for roughly 1 million pregnant women to delay preterm births. Judith Maloni, professor at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University, said a comprehensive review of more than 70 evidence-based research articles challenges whether this is healthy for mothers — or their babies. She makes her report in the article, "Antepartum Bed Rest for Pregnancy Complications: Efficacy and Safety for Preventing Preterm Birth," in the special women's health issue ...

CINCINNATI—It's no surprise that being a physician is a very stressful job and carries a lot of responsibility with it. But two new studies from researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) indicate that the stressors arising from work in the clinic, where physicians are seeing patients one-on-one, can effectively be measured with hopes of improving patient care and physician job satisfaction. Ronnie Horner, PhD, and C. Jeff Jacobson, PhD, both researchers in the department of public health sciences, say their studies, published in online editions of the journal ...

An estimated 26 million people, 13% of the United States population, are living with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), and this number continues to grow. If current trends continue, there will not be enough doctors to serve this expanding patient population. To help address this crisis, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) is convening a Summit on the Nephrology Workforce during its upcoming ASN Renal Week 2010 in Denver, Colorado, on November 17. Participants will discuss this crisis, its implications, and strategies to increase the number of kidney disease doctors in ...

The Halpin Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) proudly highlight the research advances in membranous nephropathy made possible by The Halpin Foundation-ASN Research Grant, created to help young faculty develop independent research careers. This award provides recipients transition funding toward successful application for an NIH RO1 grant. Elena Torban, PhD (McGill University Faculty of Medicine), the 2008 recipient of The Halpin Foundation-ASN Research Grant, recently explained, "The generous financial two-year support provided by The Halpin Foundation ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. ¬— Underage and heavy drinking on college campuses continue to be issues for college administrators. While some campuses, such as the University of Missouri, have made strides in efforts to reduce heavy drinking on campus, administrators are continually trying to educate students about the risks of excessive drinking. Now, two MU psychologists have found that students who viewed images of beer cans packaged and displayed in university colors believed that drinking beer was less dangerous than those students who saw images of regular beer cans. "In this research, ...

A team of international researchers led by physicists in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering have made a significant breakthrough in an effort to understand the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity in complex copper-oxides—one of the most studied scientific topics in history. The University of Minnesota researchers and their international colleagues from Germany, France and China report the discovery of a novel type of magnetic wave involving oxygen atoms. The new findings could have implications for improving superconducting ...

WHAT: Newly published research by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, sheds light on a poorly understood, acute illness called Immune Reconstitution Inflammatory Syndrome (IRIS) that develops in some HIV-infected individuals soon after they begin antiretroviral therapy. IRIS affects certain HIV-infected individuals whose immune systems are heavily damaged by the virus and who have a treated or undiagnosed AIDS-associated infection. When these individuals start antiretroviral therapy and ...

Like a cosmic light bulb on a dimmer switch, Saturn emitted gradually less energy each year from 2005 to 2009, according to observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. But unlike an ordinary bulb, Saturn's southern hemisphere consistently emitted more energy than its northern one. On top of that, energy levels changed with the seasons and differed from the last time a spacecraft visited in the early 1980s. These never-before-seen trends came from an analysis of comprehensive data from the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS), an instrument built by NASA's Goddard Space ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – One of the biggest comet findings coming out of the amazing images and data taken by the University of Maryland-led EPOXI mission as it zipped past comet Hartley 2 last week is that dry ice is the 'jet' fuel for this comet and perhaps many others. Images from the flyby show spectacular jets of gas and particles bursting from many distinct spots on the surface of the comet. This is the first time images of a comet have been sharp enough to allow scientists to link jets of dust and gas with specific surface features. Analysis of the spectral signatures ...