Body

During the first 24 hours of invasion by the malaria-inducing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, red blood cells start to lose their ability to deform and squeeze through tiny blood vessels-one of the hallmarks of the deadly disease that infects nearly 400 million people each year. Now, an international team of researchers led by an MIT professor has demonstrated just why that happens.

Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers.Paddlefish fins exhibit a unique pattern of Hox expression previously thought present only in the developing hands and feet of land vertebrates (tetrapods). This result supports the notion that fossil fish already possessed the genetic toolkit needed to evolve hands, feet, fingers and toes.

A team led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists has developed a more human-like mouse model of cancer they say will aid the search for cancer-causing genes and improve the predictive value of laboratory drug testing.

Coffee is a habit for more than 50 percent of Americans, who drink, on average, 2 cups per day. This widely consumed beverage is regularly investigated and debated for its impact on health conditions from breast cancer to heart disease. Among its complex effects on the body, coffee or its components have been linked to lower insulin and uric acid levels on a short-term basis or cross-sectionally. These and other mechanisms suggest that coffee consumption may affect the risk of gout, the most prevalent inflammatory arthritis in adult males.

MIT researchers have undertaken a first-of-its-kind analysis of bone's mechanical properties and discovered new things about how a bone absorbs energy. The insights gained from this work could lead to the creation of new, tougher materials.MIT researchers created this nanoscale map of the stiffness of bone. Image courtesy / Ortiz Lab, MIT

Researchers at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute describe in this week’s issue of Science a new candidate breast-cancer susceptibility gene. The Rap80 gene is required for the normal DNA-repair function of the well-known breast cancer gene BRCA1.Upper panels: BRCA1 and Rap80 are recruited to the same structures at DNA damage sites in human cells treated with ionizing radiation. The merge panel is a digital overlay of the BRCA1 and Rap80 panels.

Effector proteins are the bad guys that help bacterial pathogens do their job of infecting the host by crippling the body's immune system. In essence, they knock down the front door of resistance and disarm the cell's alarm system.

The discovery of a flexible genetic coding in leaf-cutting ants sheds new light on how one of nature's ultimate self-organising species breeds optimum numbers of each worker type to ensure the smooth running of the colony.Research at the University of Leeds shows that despite an inherited genetic pre-disposition to grow into a particular worker caste, ant larvae can be triggered by environmental stimuli to switch development depending on colony's workforce needs.

Researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) have found that persons infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), who also have alcohol problems, were negatively affected by co-infection with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). These findings appear in the June issue of Alcoholism: Clinical Experimental Research.

High uric acid levels in the blood are a precursor of gout, the most common inflammatory arthritis in adult men. It is believed that coffee and tea consumption may affect uric acid levels but only one study has been conducted to date.

Cells have the remarkable ability to keep track of their genetic contents and -- when things go wrong – to step in and repair the damage before cancer or another life-threatening condition develops.

The discovery of a flexible genetic coding in leaf-cutting ants sheds new light on how one of nature's ultimate self-organising species breeds optimum numbers of each worker type to ensure the smooth running of the colony.

Research at the University of Leeds shows that despite an inherited genetic pre-disposition to grow into a particular worker caste, ant larvae can be triggered by environmental stimuli to switch development depending on colony's workforce needs.

Integrating bio-chemical sensors into textiles for continuous monitoring of a person's health is the goal of the EU-funded BIOTEX ('Bio-sensing textile for health management') project.

As the first of its kind, the project is developing optimal electric, electrochemical and optical sensors which will be embedded into a textile substrate to create 'sensing patches' able to monitor the biochemical parameters of a user.

Scientists subjected mice to a diet that was 40 percent fat and lots of high fructose corn syrup - the human equivalent of a McDonald's meal and 8 cans of soda per day - and it took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance, the beginning of type II diabetes, to begin.

Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.