Body

HOUSTON – Fibrous tissue long suspected of making pancreatic cancer worse actually supports an immune attack that slows tumor progression but cannot overcome it, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the journal Cancer Cell.

Blocking a pain receptor in mice not only extends their lifespan, it also gives them a more youthful metabolism, including an improved insulin response that allows them to deal better with high blood sugar.

To guarantee efficient use of nutrients, cells have systems that permit them to capture and transport the available nutrient molecules to their interior. But if several nutrients are available, cells can select those that are of most interest and discard undesired molecules.

The world has great expectations that stem cell research one day will revolutionize medicine. But in order to exploit the potential of stem cells, we need to understand how their development is regulated. Now researchers from University of Southern Denmark offer new insight.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — New research represents a significant change in the understanding of how pancreatic cancer grows – and how it might be defeated.

Unlike other types of cancer, pancreatic cancer produces a lot of scar tissue and inflammation. For years, researchers believed that this scar tissue, called desmoplasia, helped the tumor grow, and they've designed treatments to attack this.

New Rochelle, NY, May 22, 2014—To make up for insufficient amounts of SMN protein, the cause of the inherited neuromuscular disease spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), researchers have successfully delivered a replacement SMN1 gene directly to the spinal cords of animal models of SMA.

Crowding has notoriously negative effects at large size scales, blamed for everything from human disease and depression to community resource shortages. But relatively little is known about the influence of crowding at the cellular level. A new JILA study shows that a crowded environment has dramatic effects on individual biomolecules.

The nation's obesity epidemic is striking all groups of Americans, affecting those with more education and those with less education, as well as all ethnic groups, according to a new analysis that challenges prevailing assumptions about the reasons why the nation is getting heavier.

Thanks to a fungus, the medicinal plant ribwort plantain gains a higher concentration of the defensive compound catalpol. Biologists at Bielefeld University report this discovery in a study to be published this Thursday (22.5.2014) in the scientific journal 'Nature Communications'. The increase in catalpol gives the plant better protection against pests. In the study, the research team worked with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These are known to colonize the roots of land plants. The plants benefit from this, because the fungus provides them with nutrients and minerals.

Slight modifications in their genome sequences play a crucial role in the conversion of pluripotent stem cells into various differentiated cell types. A team at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has now identified the factor responsible for one class of modification.

TORONTO, May 22, 2014 -- Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital have shown for the first time that, in addition to weight loss, a specific low-carbohydrate diet may also reduce the risk of heart disease by 10 per cent over 10 years.

The diet, often called Eco-Atkins, is a low-carbohydrate vegan diet. Many low-carbohydrate diets have been proven to improve weight loss but most emphasize eating animal proteins and fats, which may raise cholesterol. Diets that are high in vegetable proteins and oils may reduce the risk of heart disease by lowering "bad cholesterol."

Sanfilippo A syndrome or Mucopolysaccharidosis IIIA (MPS-IIIA) is a rare genetic lysosomal storage disease inherited from the parents of the patient. Lysosomes are the body's vehicle for breaking down many of its by-products such as proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids and cellular debris. The spherical vesicles are known to contain 50 different enzymes which are all active around an acidic environment of about pH 5.

The so-called symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungus that grow on their roots may actually work more like a capitalist market relationship between buyers and sellers, according to the new study published in the journal New Phytologist.

Washington D.C., May 22, 2014 – A study published in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found a very much higher discharge rate for pediatric bipolar (PBD) in children and adolescents aged 1-19 years in the US compared to England between the years 2000-2010.

Palaeontology has traditionally proceeded slowly, with individual scientists labouring for years or even decades over the interpretation of single fossils which they have gradually recovered from entombing rock, sand grain by sand grain, using all manner of dental drills and needles.

The introduction of X-ray tomography has revolutionized the way that fossils are studied, allowing them to be virtually extracted from the rock in a fraction of the time necessary to prepare specimens by hand and without the risk of damaging the fossil.