Envelope for an Artificial Cell
Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life. Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and Itay Budin, a graduate student [...]
Researchers Induce Alzheimer’s Neurons from Pluripotent Stem Cells
First-ever feat provides new method to understand cause of disease, develop drugs Led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, scientists have, for the first time, created stem cell-derived, in vitro models of sporadic and hereditary Alzheimer’s disease (AD), using induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with the much-dreaded neurodegenerative [...]
Genetic Study Offers Clues to How Intelligence Changes Through Life
Scientists have estimated for the first time the extent to which genes determine changes in intelligence across the human life course. The study found that genetic factors may account for about 24 per cent of changes in intelligence between childhood and old age. The findings also suggest that many of the genes that affect intelligence [...]
A First: Brain Support Cells from Umbilical Cord Stem Cells
For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, among other nervous system diseases. “This is the first time this has been done with non-embryonic stem cells,” says James Hickman, a [...]
Walk This Way: Scientists and MBL Physiology Course Students Describe How a Motor Protein “Steps Out”
Just like people, some proteins have characteristic ways of “walking,” which (also like human gaits) are not so easy to describe. But now scientists have discovered the unique “drunken sailor” gait of dynein, a protein that is critical for the function of every cell in the body and whose malfunction has been associated with neurodegenerative [...]
A Gene for Depression Localized
Psychiatric disorders can be described on many levels, the most traditional of which are subjective descriptions of the experience of being depressed and the use of rating scales that quantify depressive symptoms. Over the past two decades, research has developed other strategies for describing the biological underpinnings of depression, including volumetric brain measurements using magnetic [...]
Human Skull Study Causes Evolutionary Headache
Scientists studying a unique collection of human skulls have shown that changes to the skull shape thought to have occurred independently through separate evolutionary events may have actually precipitated each other. Researchers at the Universities of Manchester and Barcelona examined 390 skulls from the Austrian town of Hallstatt and found evidence that the human skull [...]
UCSF-Led Team Discovers Cause of Rare Disease – PKD/IC
Childhood Disorder Called PKD that Causes Epileptic Seizures Linked to Genetic Mutations A large, international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has identified the gene that causes a rare childhood neurological disorder called PKD/IC, or “paroxysmal kinesigenic dyskinesia with infantile convulsions,” a cause of epilepsy in babies [...]
Neuroscientists Boost Memory Using Genetics and Memory Enhancing Drug
When the activity of a molecule that is normally elevated during viral infections is inhibited in the brain, mice learn and remember better, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reported in a recent article in the journal Cell. “The molecule PKR (the double-stranded RNA-activated protein kinase) was originally described as a sensor of viral infections, [...]
Towards a Therapy to Healing Stroke
KIT Biologists Supply Major Results for Understanding the Thalamus, the “Relay Center” of the Brain The thalamus is the central translator in the brain: Specialized nerve cells (neurons) receive information from the sensory organs, process it, and transmit it deep into the brain. Researchers from the Institute of Toxicology and Genetics (ITG) of KIT have [...]
