Life Sciences and Chemistry

St. Jude researchers say reprogrammed nucleus model could offer valuable clues to how certain influencing factors combine with DNA mutations to cause tumors

Nuclei removed from mouse brain tumor cells and transplanted into mouse eggs whose own nuclei have been removed, give rise to cloned embryos with normal tissues, even though the mutations causing the cancer are still present. This research, from scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, appears in the June 1 issue

How infants respond to their mother’s touches and smiles influences their development in a manner much like what young birds experience when learning to sing, according to a research project involving the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington and the Biological Foundations of Behavior program at Franklin and Marshall College.

An article on the research, titled “Social interaction shapes babbling: Testing parallels between birdsong and speech,” will be published this wee

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have determined that a protein essential for the normal embryonic development of fruit flies is also used by mammals to assist in the timely healing of cuts and lacerations.

Their discovery, detailed in the June 3 issue of the journal Developmental Cell, provides new insight for scientists into the molecular mechanisms responsible for wound healing in humans and may one day lead to the design of new drugs for individuals whose healing is

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) have identified a small chemical molecule that controls the fate of embryonic stem cells.

“We found molecules that can direct the embryonic stem cells to [become] neurons,” says Sheng Ding, who recently completed his Ph.D. work at TSRI and is becoming an assistant professor in the chemistry department. Ding is the lead author on the study, which is described

By combining genes from three separate organisms into a single bacterial factory, University of California, Berkeley, chemical engineers have developed a simpler, less expensive way to make an antimalaria “miracle” drug that is urgently needed in Third World countries.

The drug, artemisinin, is one of the most promising next-generation antimalarials because of its effectiveness against strains of the malaria parasite now resistant to front-line drugs. It is now too expensive for broad use i

Scientists from the RIKEN Tsukuba Institute (Japan) have developed a valuable new experimental system for tissue-specific RNAi knockdown in mammalian cells and organisms – a discovery that will markedly advance the functional characterization of genes involved in development and disease.

Discovered in the late nineties, RNA intereference (RNAi) refers to the introduction of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) into a cell, where it induces the degradation of complementary mRNA, and thereby suppresse