Health News

Identification Of Key Cellular Organelle Involved In Gene Silencing Could Help In The Development Of Drugs To Fight Diseases

Date: Apr-29-2013
RNA molecules, made from DNA, are best known for their role in protein production. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), however, are short (~22) nucleotide RNA sequences found in plants and animals that do not encode proteins but act in gene regulation and, in the process, impact almost all biological processes - from development to physiology to stress response. Present in almost in every cell, microRNAs are known to target tens to hundreds of genes each and to be able to repress, or "silence," their expression. What is less well understood is how exactly miRNAs repress target gene expression...

Psychology, Microbiology And Oncology News From 'Frontiers'

Date: Apr-29-2013
Frontiers in Psychology Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement What makes some people more creative than others? Psychologists have suggested that creativity partly depends on a person's ability to continuously switch attention between the details and the bigger picture of a given task...

Vulnerable Spot On Respiratory Syncytial Virus Protein Could Lead To Vaccine

Date: Apr-29-2013
An atomic-level snapshot of a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) protein bound to a human antibody represents a leap toward developing a vaccine for a common - and sometimes very serious - childhood disease. The findings, by scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, define the vulnerable shape of a critical RSV component called the fusion glycoprotein. The NIAID scientists determined the fusion glycoprotein's shape as it appears before its interaction with human cells...

Reversal Of Nearly Decade-Long Trend Of Rising Uninsured Rates Among Young Adults

Date: Apr-29-2013
Eighty-four million people - nearly half of all working-age U.S. adults - went without health insurance for a time last year or had out-of-pocket costs that were so high relative to their income they were considered underinsured, according to the Commonwealth Fund 2012 Biennial Health Insurance Survey. The survey also found that the proportion of young adults ages 19-25 who were uninsured during the year fell from 48 percent to 41 percent between 2010 and 2012, reversing a nearly decade-long trend of rising uninsured rates in that age group...

Patients' Health May Be Jeopardized By High Leukemia Treatment Costs

Date: Apr-29-2013
The increasing cost of treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in the United States has reached unsustainably high levels and may be leaving many patients under - or untreated because they cannot afford care, according to a Blood Forum article supported by nearly 120 CML experts from more than 15 countries on five continents and published online in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH)...

How The Tumor Suppressor P53 Is Shut Down In Metastatic Melanoma - And How It Can Be Revived

Date: Apr-29-2013
Cancer cells are a problem for the body because they multiply recklessly, refuse to die and blithely metastasize to set up shop in places where they don't belong. One protein that keeps healthy cells from behaving this way is a tumor suppressor named p53. This protein stops potentially precancerous cells from dividing and induces suicide in those that are damaged beyond repair. Not surprisingly, p53's critical function is disrupted in most cancers...

Parkinson's Disease Protein Acts Like A Virus

Date: Apr-29-2013
A protein known to be a key player in the development of Parkinson's disease is able to enter and harm cells in the same way that viruses do, according to a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study. The protein is called alpha-synuclein. The study shows how, once inside a neuron, alpha synuclein breaks out of lysosomes, the digestive compartments of the cell. This is similar to how a cold virus enters a cell during infection...

Researchers Identify New Targets That Cause Abnormal Cell Division

Date: Apr-29-2013
Blocking certain enzymes in the cell may prevent cancer cell division and growth, according to new findings from researchers at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The discovery is published in the journal Molecular Cell. In order to divide, a cell needs to create copies of its genetic material to provide to the new cells, called the "daughter" cells...

A New Level Of Variation In Messenger RNAs Exposed

Date: Apr-29-2013
Like musicians in an orchestra who have the same musical score but start and finish playing at different intervals, cells with the same genes start and finish transcribing them at different points in the genome. For the first time, researchers at EMBL have described the striking diversity of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that such start and end variation produces, even from the simple genome of yeast cells. Their findings, published In Nature, shed new light on the importance of mRNA boundaries in determining the functional potential of genes...

Three Different Diseases Controlled By One Gene

Date: Apr-29-2013
An international research consortium led by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), the CIBERER and the University of Wurzburg (Germany) has discovered a gene that can cause three totally different diseases, depending on how it is altered. The researchers, using next-generation massive ultrasequencing techniques, have sequenced the over 20,000 genes of a Fanconi anaemia patient's genome...