Body

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – There are always exceptions to a rule, even one that has prevailed for more than three decades, as demonstrated by a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) study on RNA splicing, a cellular editing process. The rule-flaunting exception uncovered by the study concerns the way in which a newly produced RNA molecule is cut and pasted at precise locations called splice sites before being translated into protein.

One-letter switches in the DNA code occur much more frequently in human genomes than anticipated, but are often only found in one or a few individuals.

The abundance of rare variations across the human genome is consistent with the population explosion of the past few thousand years, medical geneticists and evolutionary biologists report in the May 17 advanced online edition of Science.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- How species diversity is maintained is a fundamental question in biology. In a new study, a team of Indiana University biologists has shown for the first time that diversity is influenced on a spatial scale of unparalleled scope, in part, by how well tree seedlings survive under their own parents.

Innate differences in immunity can be detected at birth, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. And babies with a better innate response to viruses have fewer respiratory illnesses in the first year of life.

Picture a turtle the size of a Smart car, with a shell large enough to double as a kiddie pool. Paleontologists from North Carolina State University have found just such a specimen – the fossilized remains of a 60-million-year-old South American giant that lived in what is now Colombia.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Next Mother's Day, say it with an evolved model of logistical efficiency — a flower. A new discovery about how nature's icons of romance manage the distribution of sperm among female gametes with industrial precision helps explain why the delicate beauties have reproduced prolifically enough to dominate the earth.

When it comes to weight gain, when you eat might be at least as important as what you eat. That's the conclusion of a study reported in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism published early online on May 17th.

NEW YORK (May 17, 2012) -- Over the past decade, research in the field of epigenetics has revealed that chemically modified bases are abundant components of the human genome and has forced us to abandon the notion we've had since high school genetics that DNA consists of only four bases.

In two back-to-back reports published online on 17 May in Cell, researchers have sequenced the genomes of 21 breast cancers and analysed the mutations that emerged during the tumours' development. The individual results are described below.

Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish "g" from "q." What details did you miss?

Geneticists faced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a "sixth nucleotide" in the DNA alphabet. Two modifications of cytosine, one of the four bases that make up DNA, look almost the same but mean different things. But scientists lacked a way of reading DNA, letter by letter, and detecting precisely where these modifications are found in particular tissues or cell types.

Hatori cautioned that people should not jump to the conclusion that eating lots of unhealthy food is alright as long as we fast. "What we showed is under daily fasting the body can fight unhealthy food to a significant extent," she says. "But there are bound to be limits."

The recent excesses of Wall Street may be big news but behind the headlines there's another story: When it comes to men and women stockbrokers, someone is taking home a bigger paycheck.

New research shows that women stockbrokers sometimes earn as much as 20 percent less than their male counterparts. "Stockbrokers are among the highest paid workers, yet they have the greatest gender inequality among all sales worker jobs," says Prof. Janice Fanning Madden, who conducted the research.

Defects in the gene that encodes the XIAP protein result in a serious immune malfunction. Scientists used biochemical analyses to map the protein's ability to activate vital components of the immune system. Their results have recently been published in Molecular Cell, a journal of international scientific repute.

A device which could restore sight to patients with one of the most common causes of blindness in the developed world is being developed in an international partnership.

Researchers from the University of Strathclyde and Stanford University in California are creating a prosthetic retina for patients of age related macular degeneration (AMD), which affects one in 500 patients aged between 55 and 64 and one in eight aged over 85.

AURORA, Colo. (May 17, 2012) - We have known for years that when the proteins RalA and RalB are present, cells in dishes copy toward aggressive forms of cancer. However, until this week, no study had explored the effects of RAL proteins in human cancers – an essential step on the path to developing drugs to target these proteins.