Body

There's no peak in sight – fitness peak, that is – for the bacteria in Richard Lenski's Michigan State University lab.

Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, has been running his evolutionary bacteria experiment for 25 years, generating more than 50,000 generations. In a paper published in the current issue of Science, Michael Wiser, lead author and MSU graduate student in Lenski's lab, compares it to hiking.

Boston, Mass. - Nursing leaders from 38 children's hospitals, led by Patricia Hickey, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN, vice president of critical care and cardiovascular services at Boston Children's Hospital, demonstrated that nursing education and experience significantly impact outcomes for patients who underwent cardiac surgery. The researchers recommend that there be no more than 20 percent of nurses with less than two years of clinical experience in pediatric ICUs to decrease mortality rates.

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Dermatology shows that a handful of academic journals have successfully leveraged social media to reach many times the readers of the journals themselves. But the majority of journals have yet to embrace social media and so lag behind professional organizations and patient advocacy groups in their ability to disseminate information in a culturally relevant way.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have used genetic engineering of human induced pluripotent stem cells to specifically and precisely parse the roles of a key mutated protein in causing familial Alzheimer's disease (AD), discovering that simple loss-of-function does not contribute to the inherited form of the neurodegenerative disorder.

Medical researchers at the University of Alberta have discovered the structure of a potential drug target for a rare genetic disease, paving the way for an alternative treatment for the condition.

Research with baboons at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute may help explain why some people who take bone-strengthening drugs like bisphosphonates are at-risk for atypical fractures in the long bones in their legs.

The deadly toxin produced by anthrax bacteria can hide out in human cells for days, invisible both to our immune systems and to the cellular machinery responsible for destroying proteins. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports on November 14th explain why antibiotics aren't always enough to cure anthrax infections.

As dengue fever continues to spread from Key West north into the Florida mainland, it remains a mystery as to why this dangerous mosquito-borne illness is not yet common around Tucson, Arizona—even though outbreaks routinely occur in nearby Mexico and mosquitoes that can carry dengue are now common in the state, according to a new research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).

One of the main mechanisms the body uses to protect itself against cancer is to switch off defective cells by making them senescent; these cells do not die but stop dividing: their life cycle stops. A team of researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid and another one from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have discovered, and are publishing in two articles in the journal Cell, that this switching-off mechanism also takes place in embryos, and not as a response to cell damage but as part the normal process of development.

The bacterium responsible for anthrax develops a strategy reminiscent of the Trojan horse tale. Its pathogenic factor is able to penetrate inside a cell in such a way that it becomes completely invisible to both the immune system and medical analysis. Furthermore, it manages to exit the cell several days later, and then it continues to poison other cells.

Researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) lead by Dr. Sandra Peiró have described a new function for two key molecules involved in tumor progression. Transcription factor SNAIL1 and enzyme LOXL2 are essential to Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT); meaning the process by which tumor cells are able to move and reach other tissues. The study has been published in the Molecular Cell Journal and places enzyme LOXL2 as a possible therapeutic target to treat cancers such as breast, lung or skin cancer.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- About half of all cancer patients have a mutation in a gene called p53, which allows tumors to survive and continue growing even after chemotherapy severely damages their DNA.

A new study from MIT biologists has found that tumor cells with mutated p53 can be made much more vulnerable to chemotherapy by blocking another gene called MK2. In a study of mice, tumors lacking both p53 and MK2 shrank dramatically when treated with the drug cisplatin, while tumors with functional MK2 kept growing after treatment.

A collaborative team of researchers led by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Edinburgh has identified a gene responsible for Warburg Micro syndrome, a rare genetic disease characterized by eye, brain and endocrine abnormalities. Patients with Warburg Micro syndrome are severely physically and mentally challenged, unable to learn how to walk or speak and become blind and paralyzed from an early age.

HOUSTON -- ( Nov. 14, 2013 ) -- What could someday be the first blood test for the early detection of breast cancer was shown in preliminary studies to successfully identify the presence of breast cancer cells from serum biomarkers, say the Houston Methodist Research Institute scientists who are developing the technology.

WASHINGTON, DC – November 17, 2013 – Piglets fed probiotic Enterococcus faecium showed reduced numbers of potentially pathogenic Escherichia coli strains in their intestines, according to a team of German researchers. The research is important, because in 2006 the European Union prohibited the feeding of antibiotics to livestock as growth promoters. Therefore, the research team sought to investigate whether probiotics could substitute for antibiotics, by reducing pathogen populations in the intestines, says first author Carmen Bednorz of Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.