Body

Washington, DC—Postmenopausal women with diverse gut bacteria exhibit a more favorable ratio of estrogen metabolites, which is associated with reduced risk for breast cancer, compared to women with less microbial variation, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

Annual flu epidemics cause millions of cases of severe illness and up to half a million deaths every year around the world, despite widespread vaccination programs. A study published by Cell Press on September 11th in Immunity reveals that gut microbes play an important role in stimulating protective immune responses to the seasonal flu vaccine in mice, suggesting that differences in the composition of gut microbes in different populations may impact vaccine immunity. The study paves the way for global public health strategies to improve the effectiveness of the flu vaccine.

Mice treated with antibiotics to remove most of their intestinal bacteria or raised under sterile conditions have impaired antibody responses to seasonal influenza vaccination, researchers have found.

The findings suggest that antibiotic treatment before or during vaccination may impair responses to certain vaccines in humans. The results may also help to explain why immunity induced by some vaccines varies in different parts of the world.

Bacteria that normally live in and upon us have genetic blueprints that enable them to make thousands of molecules that act like drugs, and some of these molecules might serve as the basis for new human therapeutics, according to UC San Francisco researchers who report their new discoveries in the September 11, 2014 issue of Cell.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Living cells are like miniature factories, responsible for the production of more than 25,000 different proteins with very specific 3-D shapes. And just as an overwhelmed assembly line can begin making mistakes, a stressed cell can end up producing misshapen proteins that are unfolded or misfolded.

A study comparing how blood stem cells and leukemia cells consume nutrients found that cancer cells are far less tolerant to shifts in their energy supply than their normal counterparts. The results suggest that there could be ways to target leukemia metabolism so that cancer cells die but other cell types are undisturbed.

Higher HIV risk behaviors and prevalence have been reported among Puerto Rican people who inject drugs (PRPWID) since early in the HIV epidemic. Now that HIV prevention and treatment advances have reduced HIV among PWID in the US, researchers from New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) examined HIV-related data for PRPWID in Puerto Rico (PR) and Northeastern US (NE) to assess whether disparities among PRPWID continue.

A joint work by EPFL, ETH Zürich and the CHUV has identified a pathological process that takes place in both mice and humans towards one of the most common diseases that people face in the industrialized world: type 2 diabetes.

This work was conducted in Johan Auwerx's (EPFL) and Ruedi Aebersold's (ETH Zürich) laboratories, and succeeded thanks to the combination of each team's strengths. The relevance of their discovery, published today in Cell Metabolism, results from their joint effort.

Sept. 11, 2014 - New research from Arizona State University and the University of Tokyo that analyzes transmission rates of Ebola in West African countries shows how rapidly the disease is spreading.

NEW YORK (September 10, 2014) – Members of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care (MECCC) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University's NCI–designated Albert Einstein Cancer Center will present new study findings at the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO)

BATON ROUGE – In a study that sheds light on the origin of bird species in the biologically rich rainforests of South America, LSU Museum of Natural Science Director and Roy Paul Daniels Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Robb Brumfield, and an international team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, published a paper this week challenging the view that speciation – the process by which new species are formed – is directly linked to geological and climatic changes to the landscape.

Around 12,800 years ago, a sudden, catastrophic event plunged much of the Earth into a period of cold climatic conditions and drought. This drastic climate change—the Younger Dryas—coincided with the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, such as the saber-tooth cats and the mastodon, and resulted in major declines in prehistoric human populations, including the termination of the Clovis culture.

LAWRENCE — A study from the University of Kansas finds that people can accurately detect the personality traits of strangers through Facebook activity; however, changes to the social media site in the past three years could be making it harder to do so.

A team of Iranian researchers from the Rice Research Institute of Iran have discovered that Gynnodomorpha permixtana, a well-known moth species from Europe and Asia, has changed its host preferences in order to adjust to Iran's northern region environmental conditions.

There are more than 150 species of beetles in the genus Calathus, 17 of which have only been found in the mountains of the Ethiopian Highlands. Now scientists have found two new ones — Calathus juan and Calathus carballalae — and have described them in Annals of the Entomological Society of America.