Life Sciences and Chemistry

What do Smallpox, AIDS, SARS, Monkeypox, West Nile Virus, Chestnut Blight, Dutch Elm Disease, Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, Sea Otter Mortality and Avian Flu have to do with the world-wide disappearance of frogs and salamanders, otherwise known as “Amphibian Decline”? And with bait shops?

These diseases and their pathogens, with the unsuspecting support of humans and our global activities, all have been involved in microbial invasions of sorts. The transportation and sale of live bait

BU neurobiologists find evidence hippocampus in rat brain triggers special form of memory

For millennia, the process of memory and remembering has intrigued scholars and scientists. In 350 B.C., Aristotle, in his seminal treatise on the subject, described it as having two forms: familiarity and recollection. Of these, he considered recollection to be a purely human condition. That tenet is now being challenged by researchers at Boston University.

Neurobiologists at Boston

By mimicking a molecular switch that triggers cell death, researchers have killed cells grown in the laboratory from one of the most resilient and aggressive cancers – a virulent brain cancer known as glioblastoma. The new approach to tricking the cell-death machinery could be applied to a wide range of cancers where this pathway, known as apoptosis, has been inactivated.

The researchers — led by Xiaodong Wang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Tex

New ’ring of life’ points to mergers and acquisitions between cells

According to a new report, complex cells like those in the human body probably resulted from the fusion of genomes from an ancient bacterium and a simpler microbe, Archaea, best known for its ability to withstand extreme temperatures and hostile environments. The finding provides strong evidence that complex cells arose from combinations of simpler organisms in a symbiotic effort to survive. Jim Lake and

Many cancers, including colon, prostate, and leukemia, continue to grow unchecked because they do not respond to a signal to die and stop proliferating from Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGF-b). The cause of this signaling disruption of the normal cell cycle has not been fully understood. For the first time, scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have discovered the biologic function of the cytoplasmic form of the Promyelocytic Leukemia protein (PML), and identified it as an essenti

New technology will open doors in biophysical research and education

The 4Pi-Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope is world’s most advanced light-based microscope-capable of revealing the structure of genetic material within a cell in three dimensions. The first such instrument is now coming to the United States, thanks to a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to a Maine interdisciplinary biophysical research program.

The Institute for Molecular Biophysics (IMB) brings t