Life Sciences and Chemistry

Team work is just as important in your brain as it is on the playing field: A new study published online on April 19 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that groups of brain cells can substantially improve their ability to discriminate between different orientations of simple visual patterns by synchronizing their electrical activity.

The paper, “Cooperative synchronized assemblies enhance orientation discrimination,” by Vanderbilt professor of biomedical engineeri

Close look at structure of transport proteins could aid search Red-blooded genealogists take note: The discovery in microbes of two oxygen-packing proteins, the earliest known ancestors to hemoglobin, brings scientists closer to identifying the earliest life forms to use oxygen. According to the project’s lead investigator, University of Hawaii microbiologist Maqsudul Alam, the research may also aid in the search for blood substitutes as new

For the first time, Imperial College London researchers at the Hammersmith Hospital studying a rare bone marrow disease have found an association between ’telomere shortening’ – changes in the lengths of DNA repeats at the end of chromosomes – and the time of development and severity of disease symptoms in patients.

Reporting in Nature Genetics today (18 April 2004), the Hammersmith team, collaborating with scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in the USA, is

The phrase “biological clock” has expanded from scientific observation to American slang. When we hear this phrase, many of us assume it refers to the amount of time left for a woman to start a family. For the scientist, the biological clock refers to a process that took millions of years to evolve – the conditioning of plants and animals by a light cycle that starts with dawn and ends with sunset.

The cycle of dawn and dusk changes with the seasons everywhere in the world (except at the eq

New target blocks B-ALL, boosts Gleevec’s effectiveness against CML in mice

Three years ago, using the first of a new class of drugs known as “small molecule kinase inhibitors,” medicine slammed shut a door used by cancer. Researchers at The Jackson Laboratory just found another door that kinase inhibitors may close to cancer.

The gene BCR-ABL1 causes two types of leukemia: chronic myelogeneous leukemia (CML) and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL). In both canc

Researchers find drug that may suppress genetic mutation using a novel screening approach

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a way of identifying promising new drugs that may get around a major challenge in drug discovery. In the May issue of Nature Biotechnology the team from the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center (CVRC) describes using an animal model to screen for a compound that suppresses a serious genetic mutation. Their success did not rely on first i