Body

Although the presenting features of colorectal cancer are well known, the risks they confer are less well defined. New research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine describes the exact risks posed by eight clinical features for the development of colorectal cancer in a large group of patients.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have identified tiny molecules that may lead to big breakthroughs in the treatment of hearing loss and deafness.

An international team, including researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Purdue University, found that lack of these molecules causes abnormal development of the inner ear and leads to progressive hearing loss.

Donna Fekete, the Purdue professor of biological sciences involved in the study, said this new information could provide promising leads to treat hearing loss.

Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, UW assistant professor of pathology and the senior author on the study, said that defining cellular mechanisms that prevent accumulation of these proteins may point to new therapeutic targets for devastating diseases that often accompany old age in people. Toxic protein aggregations, he explained, are seen in the brain cells of those with Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and several other degenerative conditions that afflict the elderly.

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- Scientists have found an ancient ecosystem below an Antarctic glacier and learned that it survived millions of years by transforming sulfur and iron compounds for growth.

In a follow-up to a 2006 study, a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher and his colleagues found that an in-class writing assignment designed to reinforce students' sense of identity and personal integrity increased the grade-point averages of African-American middle school students over a two-year period, and reduced the rate at which these students were held back or placed in remediation.

Anyone who studied a little genetics in high school has heard of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But those are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, 5-methylcytosine (5-mC), that sometimes replaces cytosine in the famous DNA double helix to regulate which genes are expressed. And now there's a sixth.

Researchers have discovered an important element for making night vision possible in nocturnal mammals: the DNA within the photoreceptor rod cells responsible for low light vision is packaged in a very unconventional way, according to a report in the April 17th issue of Cell, a Cell Press publication. That special DNA architecture turns the rod cell nuclei themselves into tiny light-collecting lenses, with millions of them in every nocturnal eye.

When plaques coating blood vessel walls rupture and expose collagen, platelets spring into action to form a blood clot at the damaged site. Now, a new report in the April 17th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, reveals how those life-threatening clots—a leading cause of death in the United States, Europe and other industrialized countries--get an early grip. The discovery might offer a new way to fight clot formation before it can even begin, according to the researchers.

An Emory University study shows some of the first direct evidence of a process required for epigenetic reprogramming between generations – a finding that could shed more light on the mechanisms of fertilization, stem-cell formation and cloning. The journal Cell published the results of the study on the nematode C. elegans in its April 17 issue.

A team from the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at Université de Montréal has succeeded in producing a large quantity of laboratory stem cells from a small number of blood stem cells obtained from bone marrow. The multidisciplinary team, directed by Dr. Guy Sauvageau, thus took a giant step towards the development of a revolutionary treatment based on these stem cells. This worldwide first will advance stem cell research and could have major implications in several fields for which no treatment currently exists.

Berkeley -- Move over, Y chromosome – it's time X got some attention.

In the first evolutionary study of the chromosome associated with being female, University of California, Berkeley, biologist Doris Bachtrog and her colleagues show that the history of the X chromosome is every bit as interesting as the much-studied, male-determining Y chromosome, and offers important clues to the origins and benefits of sexual reproduction.

A single crafty protein allows the deadly bacterium Salmonella enterica to both invade cells lining the intestine and hijack cellular functions to avoid destruction, Yale researchers report in the April 17 issue of the journal Cell.

This evolutionary slight-of-hand sheds new insights into the lethal tricks of Salmonella, which kills more than 2 million people a year.

Whether people with Alzheimer's disease benefit in the long term from non-drug treatment interventions remains an unanswered question. This unsatisfactory finding is mainly due to the fact that convincing studies are lacking so far. For individual approaches, the studies provide indications of a benefit, but also of harm. This is the conclusion of a report by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care, Cologne, which was published in March 2009 and for which an English-language summary is now available.

Kingston, ON – A Queen's University research team has found that a painful pelvic affliction associated with adult men occurs as frequently in adolescent boys. Chronic prostatitis or chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) is a urogenital disease associated with persistent and life-altering pelvic and genital pain.

This is the first study to estimate the prevalence of CP-like symptoms in adolescent males, and to show the negative impact that pain, urinary symptoms, and depression have on boys' quality of life. The study is published in the British Journal of Urology.

A study comparing the bone health of 105 post-menopausal vegan Buddhist nuns and 105 non-vegetarian women, matched in every other physical respect, has produced a surprising result. Their bone density was identical.

The study was led by Professor Tuan Nguyen from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research. He collaborated with Dr Ho-Pham Thuc Lan from the Pham Ngoc Thach Medical University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Their findings are now published online in Osteoporosis International.