Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered two molecular pathways that regulate the organization of heterochromatin, the nucleolus, and other features of nuclear architecture that maintain genome stability in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
Malaria may be helping spread the AIDS virus across Africa, the continent hardest hit by the incurable disease. The way the two diseases interact greatly expands the prevalence of both among people in sub-Saharan Africa, a team of scientists said in a study in the journal Science.
Breast-feeding protects children otherwise made susceptible to ear infections by abnormalities in specific human genes, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered.
Researchers at Universit? de Montr?al, working with teams at Massachusetts General Hospital and Johns Hopkins University, have made a major breakthrough in understanding an essential aspect of the immune system.
While investigating a fungus known to cause an infection in people with AIDS, two grantees of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), unexpectedly discovered a potential strategy for treating metastatic melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer.
Investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have demonstrated in mice a way that might reduce the time it takes for a bone marrow transplant to rebuild a child’s immune system, and so reduce the risk of potentially fatal virus infections that can occur during this time.
Sea urchins are small and spiny, they have no eyes and they eat kelp and algae. Still, the sea creature?s genome is remarkably similar to humans? and may hold the key to preventing and curing several human diseases, according to a University of Central Florida researcher and several colleagues.
Sildenafil and other “impotence drugs” that boost the production of a gassy chemical messenger to dilate blood vessels and produce an erection now also show promise in unmasking cancer cells so that the immune system can recognize and attack them, say scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.
The ebb and flow of such autoimmune diseases as multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis has long been a perplexing mystery to scientists. But new findings from the Stanford University School of Medicine bring scientists closer to solving the puzzle, identifying a molecule that appears to play a central role in these relapses.
A “super” form of the enzyme Akt1 could provide the key to boosting the effect of tumor vaccines by extending the lives of dendritic cells, the immune-system master switches that promote the response of T-cells, which attack tumors, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears in the “advance online publication” section of the current issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.