Body

Sophia Antipolis, 18 July 2013: A joint consensus statement on the treatment of paediatric arrhythmias has been released by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and the Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology (AEPC).

"Pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapy for arrhythmias in the paediatric population" was published in EP-Europace.1

Using an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system to automate the immunization data shared between health providers and public health agencies enables physicians to assist individual patients faster and more effectively, while also providing more immediate, cohesive community data to the agencies tasked with promoting public health.

The results of a major international effort to assess the status of dozens of European fish stocks find that many of those stocks in the northeast Atlantic are being fished sustainably today and that, given time, those populations should continue to recover. The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 18, come as surprisingly good news amid widespread criticism that the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy is failing, the researchers say.

We humans can remember events in our lives that happened years ago, with those memories often surfacing unexpectedly in response to sensory triggers: perhaps a unique flavor or scent. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on July 18 have evidence to suggest that chimpanzees and orangutans have similar capacities. In laboratory tests, both primate species were clearly able to recollect a tool-finding event that they had experienced just four times three years earlier and a singular event from two weeks before, the researchers show.

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the protein-making factory within cells consisting of tightly stacked sheets of membrane studded with the molecules that make proteins. In a study published July 18th by Cell Press in the journal Cell, researchers have refined a new microscopy imaging method to visualize exactly how the ER sheets are stacked, revealing that the 3D structure of the sheets resembles a parking garage with helical ramps connecting the different levels.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 18, 2013) – Writing in his journal about the scientists of his era, Henry David Thoreau bemoaned their blindness to significant phenomena: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." More than 150 years later, his words still ring true.

For more than a century, scientists have been peering through microscopes, carefully watching cells divide. Until now, however, none has actually seen how human cells manage to divide into two equally-sized daughter cells during mitosis.

Researchers have created a large new resource of more than 900 genes switched off one-at-a-time in mice to discover which genes are important for a wide range of biological functions such as fertility or hearing.

This resource, known as the Mouse Genetics Project, screens for characteristics and early signs of disease, revealing many new functions for well-known genes, as well as for genes with no previously-known role in disease. Many of these variations in body function are likely to underlie human diseases.

A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have identified a mechanism that can prevent the normal prion protein from changing its molecular shape into the abnormal form responsible for neurodegenerative diseases. This finding, published in the July 18 issue of Cell Reports, offers new hope in the battle against a foe that until now has always proved fatal.

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 18, 2013) – Most professional athletes are able to return to competition within a year after vertebral fusion surgery on the upper (cervical) spine, reports a study in the July issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.

BOSTON -- Investigators at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School have published the most thorough description of gene expression in the human retina reported to date. In a study published today in the journal BMC Genomics, Drs. Michael Farkas, Eric Pierce and colleagues in the Ocular Genomics Institute (OGI) at Mass. Eye and Ear reported a complete catalog of the genes expressed in the retina.

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The sounds of success are ringing at Kansas State University through a research project that has potential to treat human deafness and loss of balance.

Philine Wangemann, university distinguished professor of anatomy and physiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and her international team have published the results of their study in the July issue of the journal PLOS Genetics: "SLC26A4 Targeted to the Endolymphatic Sac Rescues Hearing and Balance in SLC26A4 Mutant Mice."

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 18, 2013) - For patients with cancer, "prehabilitation"— interventions given between the time of diagnosis and the start of treatment—has the potential to reduce complications from treatments and improve physical and mental health outcomes, according to a report in the August American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation (AJPM&R).

Scientists in Granada, Spain, have patented a new biomaterial that facilitates generating bone tissue—artificial bones in other words—from umbilical cord stem cells . The material, consisting of an activated carbon cloth support for cells that differentiate giving rise to a product that can promote bone growth, has recently been presented at a press conference at the Biomedical Research Centre, Granada.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — They say a good man is hard to find. Were it not for a newly discovered protein, the X chromosome of a male fruit fly could never be found by a gene-regulating complex that male flies need to develop and survive. And that case is just one example of what the new finding means. More generally, the research provides biologists with a model of how proteins that govern gene transcription find their targets on chromosomes, a process that's essential to healthy cell function and sometimes implicated in disease.

Bacteria of the genus Legionella have evolved a sophisticated system to replicate in the phagocytic cells of their hosts. Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have now identified a novel component of this system.