Body

The Stowers Institute's Linheng Li Lab has identified the precise location of the bone marrow stem cell niche. The findings were published today in the Advance Online Publication of Nature.

Source:

The Stowers Institute's Workman Lab has discovered a novel histone demethylase protein complex characterized in work published today in Molecular Cell.

The Stowers Institute's Baumann Lab has discovered an important step in the maturation pathway of telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the sequences that are lost at chromosome ends with every cell division. The findings were published today in the Advance Online Publication of Nature.

One fifth of the standard dose of a commonly used meningitis vaccine may be as effective as using the full dose. This new finding should allow scarce vaccine resources to be stretched further, especially during epidemics in Africa.

In a study initiated by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, together with Epicentre (the research arm of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières), and Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda, immune responses in patients receiving smaller doses of a meningitis vaccine were found to be comparable to a full dose.

If you need another reason to quit smoking, consider that it may diminish your chances of being a parent or grandparent. Scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that women exposed to second hand smoke, either as adults or children, were significantly more likely to face fertility problems and suffer miscarriages.

Patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are three times as likely to experience severe coronary events—including heart attacks—than people without the disease, according to a recent study that analyzed the risk of cardiovascular disease in nearly 1,000 patients with IPF and more than 3,500 matched controls.

Early detection of lung disease in cystic fibrosis (CF), combined with aggressive treatment in infants, may be the key to controlling the progression of the disease, according to a recent study. New research shows that contrary to previous scientific opinion, progressive lung damage in CF patients can begin as early as infancy even though lung function shortly after diagnosis is normal.

The amount of proteins produced in cells—a fundamental determinant of biological outcomes collectively known as gene expression—varies in African American individuals depending on their proportion of African or European genetic ancestry. These findings, by researchers based in Boston, Philadelphia and Oxford, are published December 5 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

All single-celled organisms are not alike. Or are they?

A Northwestern University study has found a surprising similarity among four quite different organisms. The simplest organism, a bacterium called H. pylori, uses the same number of biochemical reactions (around 300) as yeast, the largest, most complex organism of the group, when optimizing growth.

A laugh can be infectious. You don't need a sophisticated study to tell you that. But does this happy contagion vanish as quickly as a smile?

New research from James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School shows that happiness spreads far and wide through a social network – traveling not just the well-known path from one person to another but even to people up to three degrees removed.

Medical students frequently suffer from depression, especially during their internship years. New research published in the open access journal BMC Medical Education reveals the extent of the problem and features a detailed analysis of the symptoms and sufferers.

The more often a gene is differentially expressed, the more likely it is to contain disease-associated DNA variants. Research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology shows how a list of SNPs in genes that are repeatedly implicated across many publicly-available gene expression microarray experiments (so-called, 'fitSNPs'), based on differential expression rates, can be used to successfully prioritize candidate genes for further research.

To decipher how cancer develops, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center investigators say researchers must take a closer look at the packaging.

Specifically, their findings in the December 2, 2008, issue of PLoS Biology point to the three dimensional chromatin packaging around genes formed by tight, rosette-like loops of Polycomb group proteins (PcG). The chromatin packaging, a complex combination of DNA and proteins that compress DNA to fit inside cells, provides a repressive hub that keeps genes in a low expression state.

A team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant or animal.

Since the machinery involved in nucleolar dominance is some of the same machinery that can go haywire in diseases such as cancer, Pikaard and his collaborators' research may have important implications for applied medical research.