Body

Bottom Line: Cerebral small-vessel disease (SVD) and Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology appear to be associated.

Author: Maartje I. Kester, M.D., Ph.D., of the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues.

Using next generation DNA sequencing, Dartmouth scientists have identified potentially actionable mutations in cancers of the appendix. Their study, "Molecular Profiling of Appendiceal Epithelial Tumors Using Massively Parallel Sequencing to Identify Somatic Mutations," was published in the journal Clinical Chemistry today. When specific mutations for a cancer type are identified, patients can be treated with chemotherapy or other targeted agents that work on those mutations.

For a century biologists have thought they understood how the gooey growth that occurs inside cells caused their protective outer walls to expand.

Now, using new microscopic video techniques, Stanford researchers have captured the visual evidence to prove the prevailing wisdom wrong.

"What we observed was not what we had expected," said K.C. Huang, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering and the senior author of the findings, which were published online May 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

La Jolla, Calif., May 12, 2014 -- A new study carried out by researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham), the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces (Germany), the Free University of Berlin (Germany), UC San Diego, and Shinshu University (Japan) has identified a novel molecule that prevents T-cells from orchestrating asthma brought on by allergens.

A Jackson Laboratory research team led by Professor Lenny Shultz, Ph.D., reports that a protein involved in wound healing and tumor growth could be a potential therapeutic target.

In one of nature's mixed blessings, the mechanisms that work to heal cuts and wounds, rebuilding damaged cells, can also go out of control and cause cancer. But understanding those mechanisms could lead to new ways of stimulating healing in wound patients and dialing back cancerous proliferation.

MANHATTAN, Kan. — A collaborative study involving Kansas State University researchers has discovered a new gene expression mechanism in porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS, virus — an important swine pathogen that costs the U.S. pork industry more than $600 million a year. The discovery provides a new avenue for scientists to explore strategies to control and prevent the disease.

Companies can significantly improve the forecasting accuracy of forthcoming products' performance by mining online consumer buzz prior to product release, according to a study being published by Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Social media attention to a firm's forthcoming products also influences its stock price, the study shows.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have identified an alternative to a sometimes toxic therapy that protects frogs in zoos from a deadly fungal infection that has been destroying the amphibian populations worldwide. Their research is published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The fungal disease, chytridiomycosis, has been decimating frogs all over the world. At present, nothing can help amphibians in the wild, but zoos currently rely on the often-toxic itraconazole to eradicate the disease from infected amphibians they wish to acquire.

University of British Columbia scientists have uncovered an intricate chain reaction in the body's immune system and have used the knowledge to develop a new treatment against harmful viruses.

Viral pandemics, such as the coronavirus that caused the deadly SARS outbreak in 2002, have caused hundreds of deaths in Canada, yet effective anti-viral drugs are rare.

Unlike modern Man, the prehistoric people of Europe did not use mind-altering substances simply for their hedonistic pleasure. The use of alcohol and plant drugs – such as opium poppies and hallucinogenic mushrooms – was highly regulated and went hand-in-hand with the belief system and sacred burial rituals of many preindustrial societies. Elisa Guerra-Doce of the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain contends that their use was an integral part of prehistoric beliefs, and that these substances were believed to aid in communication with the spiritual world.

Viruses are the enigma of the biological world – despite having their own DNA and being able to adapt to their environment and evolve, they are not considered to be alive like cells. In order to reproduce and multiply – a requirement of "life" - a virus must invade a living cell, eject its DNA into that of the cell, and commandeer the cell's biological machinery. While a virus, essentially, may be nothing more than a dollop of DNA packed into a protective coating of protein called a capsid, the packaging of that DNA is critical.

NEW YORK, NY (May 12, 2014) —Two genes work together to drive the most lethal forms of prostate cancer, according to new research from the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). These findings could lead to a diagnostic test for identifying those tumors likely to become aggressive and to the development of novel combination therapy for the disease.

AURORA, Colo. (May 5, 2014) - The Journal of Clinical Oncology reports the case of a woman diagnosed with advanced, incurable lung cancer, whose disease was in fact early stage, curable lung cancer with additional lung lesions due to a rare antibiotic side effect. When her primary lung tumor was surgically removed, and the antibiotic stopped, the 62-year-old woman recovered and may now be cured.

DURHAM, N.C. – Growing numbers of researchers are making the data and software underlying their publications freely available online, largely in response to data sharing policies at journals and funding agencies. But in the age of open science, improving access is one thing, repurposing and reproducing research is another. In a study in the Journal of Ecology, a team of researchers experienced this firsthand when they tried to answer a seemingly simple question: what percentage of plants in the world are woody?

Philadelphia, Pa. (May 12, 2014) – Parents' attitudes toward substance use may help to explain observed racial/ethnic variations in prescription drug misuse among teens, reports a study in the May Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, the official journal of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.