Body

LA JOLLA, CA – September 23, 2012 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have shown how to synthesize in the laboratory an important set of natural compounds known as terpenes. The largest class of chemicals made by living organisms, terpenes are made within cells by some of the most complex chemical reactions found in biology.

What if you woke up every day to find that the closest grocery store had moved several miles farther away from your home? Over time, you would have to travel hundreds of extra miles to find essential food for yourself and your family. This is potentially a scenario faced by thousands of marine animals affected by climate change.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—In the first study to detail the health of Pacific Islanders living in the United States, University of Michigan researchers have found alarmingly high rates of obesity and smoking.

The preliminary findings are being presented today (Sept. 24) at a conference in Los Angeles on health disparities among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

New research from the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen University Hospital shows that low levels of vitamin D are associated with a markedly higher risk of heart attack and early death. The study involved more than 10,000 Danes and has been published in the well-reputed American journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

Satellite measurement of sea surface temperatures has yielded clear evidence of major changes taking place in the waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef over the past 25 years, marine scientists have found.

The changes have big implications for the future management of the GBR and its marine protected areas say Dr Natalie Ban and Professor Bob Pressey of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University, who led the study with Dr Scarla Weeks from the University of Queensland.

Biologists at UC San Diego have unraveled the anti-viral mechanism of a human gene that may explain why some people infected with HIV have much higher amounts of virus in their bloodstreams than others.

Their findings, detailed in a paper in this week's advance online issue of the journal Nature, could also shed light on the mystery of why some people with HIV never develop symptoms of AIDS.

Fluorescence microscopy has been a tour de force in biomedical imaging for the last several decades. In short, scientists couple fluorescent elements—the barcodes—to molecules they know will attach to the part of the cells they wanted to investigate. Illuminating the sample triggers each kind of barcode to fluoresce at a particular wavelength of light, such as red, blue, or green—indicating where the molecules of interest are.

New York, NY and Uppsala, Sweden, September 24, 2012 – Death plays a big role in keeping things alive. Consider the tightly orchestrated suicide of cells--a phenomenon essential to everything from shaping an embryo to keeping it free of cancer later in life. When cells refuse to die, and instead multiply uncontrollably, they become what we call tumors. An intricate circuitry of biochemical reactions inside cells coordinates their self-sacrifice. Tracing that circuitry is, naturally, an important part of cancer research.

Bangkok, 24 September 2012 - A study of almost 200 major international water-related projects over the past 20 years has identified a suite of existing and emerging challenges and how science can offer remedies.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), the largest public funder of projects to improve the global environment and promote sustainable development, partnered with the United Nations University and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to extract lessons from a portfolio of major transboundary water projects involving investments of more than US$7 billion.

A team of scientists with The Cancer Genome Atlas program reports their genetic characterization of 800 breast tumors, including finding some of the genetic causes of the most common forms of breast cancer, providing clues for new therapeutic targets, and identifying a molecular similarity between one sub-type of breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Their findings, which offer a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms behind each sub-type of breast cancer, are reported in the September 23, 2012 online edition of the journal Nature.

One subtype of breast cancer shares many genetic features with high-grade serous ovarian cancer, a cancer that is very difficult to treat, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that the two cancers are of similar molecular origin, which may facilitate the comparison of therapeutic data for subtypes of breast and ovarian cancers.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers and an international team of scientists have developed a highly-efficient means of editing zebrafish genomes for research purposes, eliminating a bottleneck that has stymied biomedical scientists from using the fish as a model for human disease. The details appear online today in the journal Nature.

DURHAM, N.C. – In their quest for a cancer cure, researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute made a serendipitous discovery -- a molecule necessary for cheaper and greener ways to produce nylon.

The finding, described in the Sept. 23, 2012, issue of the journal Nature Chemical Biology, arose from an intriguing notion that some of the genetic and chemical changes in cancer tumors might be harnessed for beneficial uses.

Germinal centers are sites in the organs of the lymphatic system, formed during the course of an immune response to infection, where B cells intensely proliferate and modify their DNA in order to produce antibodies specific for the pathogen. However, it is known that the vast majority of lymphomas derive from the B cells at the germinal centers. Now, Dr. Dinis Pedro Calado and Dr.

The most comprehensive analysis yet of breast cancer shows that one of the most deadly subtypes is genetically more similar to ovarian tumors than to other breast cancers.