Life Sciences and Chemistry

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh are closer to correcting an abnormal gene which causes one of the crippling muscle wasting diseases known collectively as Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease. Their findings may lead to the development of gene therapy to treat patients with CMT disease, it is reported in the current issue of Nature (9 September).

CMT affects around 23,000 people in the UK. It leads to muscle weakness and wasting in the feet, lower legs, hands and forearms and can conf

Painful and damaging chemotherapy may one day be a thing of the past. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University have developed nano-sized particles that can target and trick cancer cells into absorbing them. Once inside, the particles may soon be able to deliver a pharmaceutical payload, killing the tumor from within, avoiding the destruction of healthy cells responsible for much of the damage caused by traditional chemotherapy. The research is published in the Augu

From mollusks to mammals, newly discovered chemical pathways of serotonin in the nervous system are paving a path toward future pharmaceutical treatments for depression and other disorders.

“Understanding novel serotonin pathways in a tissue-dependent manner is useful for the development of pharmaceuticals intended to preserve serotonergic signaling,” said Jeffrey N. Stuart, a doctoral student in the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A combination of luck and scientific curiosity has produced a mouse lacking two isoenzymes, MAO A and MAO B, that have been linked to violent criminal behavior and Parkinson’s disease. The MAO A/B knockout mouse should provide an excellent model in which to address the specific roles of these neurotransmitters and their receptors in anxiety and stress-related disorders.

The research appears as the “Paper of the Week” in the September 17 issue of the Journal of Biological Chem

Discovery common to zebrafish and humans may lead to therapies that interrupt colon cancer development

Mutations in the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) tumor suppressor gene have been found to cause 85 percent of colon cancers. Now researchers at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute know why. In a paper published on-line Sept. 9 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, they explain that APC controls the conversion of dietary vitamin A into retinoic acid. If this

Researchers at the University of Bergen are now able to present new information on the HOX genes – the “software” to design animals. The findings are published in today’s issue of Nature.

Some years ago researchers at the Sars Centre for Marine Molecular Biology at the UoB discovered the smallest genome among vertebrates in a tiny urochordate called Oikopleura dioica. The organism is five millimetres long and the genome consists of only 70 million megabases (Mb). Although the human g