Body

Philadelphia, Pa. -- Fatal snakebites are a bigger-than-acknowledged global health problem that has been vastly under-reported, according to research presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene's (ASTMH) annual meeting.

A recent study of obese and non-obese children found that low vitamin D levels are significantly more prevalent in obese children and are associated with risk factors for type 2 diabetes. This study was accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

Yale Cancer Center researchers have shown that a tiny genetic variation predicts chances of survival and response to treatment for patients with ovarian cancer.

The findings, published in the journal Oncogene, provide new insights into the biology of a new class of cancer marker and suggest a genetic test may help guide the treatment of women with ovarian cancer.

Barcelona, 1st December, 2011.- A study by researchers Raúl Méndez, ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and Pilar Navarro at the IMIM (Institut de Recerca Hospital del Mar, Barcelona) describes a new reprogramming mechanism for the expression of genes responsible for turning a healthy cell into a tumor cell. In the study, published in this week's edition of Nature Medicine, the scientists have identified the protein CPEB4 as a "cellular orchestra conductor" that "activates" hundreds of genes associated with tumor growth.

December 4th, 2011, Cambridge, MA and Shenzhen, China – BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, announced that a study on frequent mutation of genes encoding ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis pathway (UMPP) components in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is published online today in Nature Genetics. In addition to BGI, co-leaders of the study included Peking University Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen Second People's Hospital, among others.

When RNA component units called ribonucleotides become embedded in genomic DNA, which contains the complete genetic data for an organism, they can cause problems for cells. It is known that ribonucleotides in DNA can potentially distort the DNA double helix, resulting in genomic instability and altered DNA metabolism, but not much is known about the fate of these ribonucleotides.

In research on the never-ending war between pathogen and host, scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have discovered a novel defensive weapon, a cytoskeletal protein called septin, that humans cells deploy to cage the invading Shigella bacteria that cause potentially fatal human diarrhea, according to a presentation on Dec. 5, at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in Denver.

A drug discovery team at Genentech, Inc., has uncovered a chink in the molecular armor of Ras, the most commonly occurring oncogene, which is a gene that when mutated has the potential of causing cancer in humans.

The chink, binding pocket of "functional significance" on the Ras oncoprotein could provide the long-sought attack point for a therapeutic agent, making the "undruggable" Ras oncogene "druggable," the researchers reported at the American Society for Cell Biology's 51st Annual Meeting in Denver.

UCLA life scientists and colleagues have produced the most comprehensive mathematical model ever devised to track the health of populations exposed to environmental change.

The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, is published Dec. 2 in the journal Science.

In a paper published in the December 2011 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign led by Rex Gaskins, PhD have demonstrated that both microbial and host inflammatory factors modulate sulfomucin production in a human cell line, LS174T, that models intestinal goblet cells.

GREAT NECK, NY -- The American Journal of Industrial Medicine recently published a study showing that World Trade Center (WTC) responders suffer from asthma at more than twice the rate of the general U.S. population as a result of their exposure to the toxic dust from the collapse of the WTC towers in 2001.

AMES, Iowa – A 'sin tax' applied to sweetened goods on store shelves is not the most efficient, effective method of lowering caloric intake from sweet food and would be more disruptive to consumers than necessary, according to Iowa State University research.

With a national debate taking shape about the possibility of a national tax on foods with high sweetener content, ISU economists have examined how such a tax would best be applied.

A cheap material that can store heat energy collected from the sun during the day that can be released slowly over night has been developed by researchers in the India. The material based on paraffin wax and stearic acid is described in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Renewable Energy Technology and could help keep homes warm in sunny parts of the world that get very cold at night without burning wood or fossil fuels.

TAMPA, Fla. (Dec. 2, 2011) – MK 1775, a small, selective inhibitor molecule, has been found to be active against many sarcomas when tested by researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. Their findings, recently appearing in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, published by the American Association for Cancer Research, suggest that a badly needed new agent against sarcomas – especially sarcomas affecting children – may be at hand.

Florida is home to one of the highest percentages of residents ages 65 and older in the United States, but very few of them have thought ahead to a time when they will no longer be able to drive a vehicle safely or considered how they will get around without a car, according to a new survey developed by Florida State University and the Florida Department of Transportation.

In fact, 13 percent of survey respondents indicated they would not stop driving at all, with 3 percent expressing the opinion that they would die before they would stop driving.