Body

A team of researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has developed an antibody that could prevent Candida infections that often afflict hospitalized patients who receive central lines.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- In plants, the growth of organs such as roots, leaves and flowers depends upon the activity of meristems. These reservoir-like compartments hold stem cells, which have the ability to develop into various different cell types.

At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Professor David Jackson studies naturally occurring mutations in plants to obtain insights about how plants regulate their growth. This work has powerful implications for efforts to increase the yield of basic food crops like maize (or corn, as it is called in North America).

Naturally occurring arsenic pollutes wells across the world, especially in south and southeast Asia, where an estimated 100 million people are exposed to levels that can cause heart, liver and kidney problems, diabetes and cancer. Now, scientists working in Vietnam have shown that massive pumping of groundwater from a clean aquifer is slowly but surely drawing the poison into the water. The study, done near the capital city of Hanoi, confirms suspicions that booming water usage there and elsewhere could eventually threaten millions more people.

The first challenge for CNIO researchers was to reproduce the Yamanaka experiment in a living being. They chose a mouse as a model organism. Using genetic manipulation techniques, researchers created mice in which Yamanaka's four genes could be activated at will. When these genes were activated, they observed that the adult cells were able to retreat in their evolutionary development to become embryonic stem cells in multiple tissues and organs.

Researchers have discovered the details of how cells repair breaks in both strands of DNA, a potentially devastating kind of DNA damage.

Researchers have discovered the details of how cells repair breaks in both strands of their DNA, a potentially devastating kind of DNA damage.

The researchers found virulent E. coli bacteria blocked a pathway that would normally protect the gut from infection. These infections are particularly serious in young children and can result in diarrhoea and other complications such as kidney damage.

The role of this pathway in fighting gut infection was previously unknown but defects in it are associated with inflammatory bowel disease.

The research, published tomorrow in Nature, provides much needed insight into how the gut fights infection.

A team of researchers, led by the University of Warwick, have published new data that could prove vital for advances in care for women who suffer from recurrent miscarriage.

The recurrent loss of pregnancy through miscarriage causes significant distress to couples, often exacerbated by there being so few treatments available to clinicians.

The search for an effective treatment has been the cause of significant controversy in the field of medical research, centering on the role of natural killer cells (or NK cells) and the ability of steroids to prevent miscarriage.

NEW YORK (September 11, 2013) – Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) treatment in a hospital setting using low dose oral vancomycin showed similar effectiveness compared to high dose, according to a new study by researchers at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. These data were presented yesterday at the 53rd Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy meeting in Denver.

Boston, MA – A study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) found that brachytherapy treatment was associated with better cause-specific survival and overall survival in women with cervical cancer. The population-based analysis also revealed geographic disparities and decline in brachytherapy treatment in the United States. Brachytherapy is a type of cancer treatment in which radioactive implants are inserted directly into the tissue near the tumor site.

The study is published in the September 2013 issue of The International Journal of Radiation Oncology.

Researchers at The Mount Sinai Medical Center have developed an innovative system to test how a virus interacts with cells in the body — to see, for example, what happens in lung cells when a deadly respiratory virus attacks them.

In the journal Cell Host & Microbe, investigators say such a technique will not only speed basic research into viral biology, it will also help scientists improve vaccine production, generate novel antiviral compounds, and advance the development of viruses that attack cancer cells.

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified an underlying biochemical mechanism that helps make cholera toxin so deadly, often resulting in life-threating diarrhea that causes people to lose as much as half of their body fluids in a single day.

Exposing young women and girls under the age of 20 to ionizing radiation can substantially raise the risk of their developing breast cancer later in life. Scientists may now know why. A collaborative study, in which Berkeley Lab researchers played a pivotal role, points to increased stem cell self-renewal and subsequent mammary stem cell enrichment as the culprits. Breasts enriched with mammary stem cells as a result of ionizing irradiation during puberty show a later-in-life propensity for developing ER negative tumors - cells that do not have the estrogen receptor.

LA JOLLA, CA—September 11, 2013—The largest DNA-sequencing study of anorexia nervosa has linked the eating disorder to variants in a gene coding for an enzyme that regulates cholesterol metabolism. The finding suggests that anorexia could be caused in part by a disruption in the normal processing of cholesterol, which may disrupt mood and eating behavior.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Millions of people who are obese and smoke tobacco may face additional health problems -- including their responses to common prescription medicines -- that extend beyond the well-known links with cancer, heart attacks and stroke, according to a report presented here today.