Life Sciences and Chemistry

Resource should greatly speed gene analysis and discovery

Researchers have produced vast libraries of short segments of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that can be used to turn off individual human and mouse genes to study their function.
The libraries will be made widely available to laboratories studying human biology and disease. The researchers are optimistic that the libraries will become a powerful research tool for gene analysis and discovery.

Two independent research gro

First protein difference between humans and primates that correlates to anatomical changes in early hominid fossil record

In an effort to find the remaining genes that govern myosin–the major contractile protein that makes up muscle tissue–researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have made a discovery that may be central to answering key questions about human evolution.

Published in the March 25 issue of Nature, Penn researchers have found one small

A new study finds that the olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) exhibit activity-dependent survival, a property that may be critical for an animal’s ability to maximize and retain responsiveness to crucial odorants in its environment. The research, published in the March 25 issue of Neuron, finds that a molecular signaling pathway linked to neuronal survival in the central nervous system plays a significant role in odor-induced enhancement of olfactory cell survival.

It is well known that

Dr. Tracey Sutton, a fish ecologist at the HARBOR BRANCH Oceanographic Institution in Ft. Pierce, Fla., has discovered a new species in a bizarre and elusive family of deep-sea predatory fish known collectively as dragonfish. The find, reported in the current issue of the journal Copeia, is the first new dragonfish species discovered in more than a decade.

The first specimen of the new species, dubbed Eustomias jimcraddocki, was large, compared to the average pencil-sized dragonfish at abou

In their first human studies of the feasibility of using brain signals to operate external devices, researchers at Duke University Medical Center report that arrays of electrodes can provide useable signals for controlling such devices. The research team is now working to develop prototype devices that may enable paralyzed people to operate “neuroprosthetic” and other external devices using only their brain signals.

While the new studies provide an initial proof of principle that human appl

The culprit behind mad cow disease, a.k.a. bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is the most infamous mammalian form of prions. Prions are misfolded proteins that are capable of growing, replicating, and being passed on to daughter cells – that is, they are by themselves heritable. Beyond their disease manifestation, prions also occur naturally in some organisms (such as yeast) and may play important roles in their growth and development. Now, Osherovich and colleagues have identified the amino acid seq