Life Sciences and Chemistry

Fndings in mice hold implications for human disorders

New research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers an important contribution to a new wave of thinking in genetics: the idea that not all human disease states are due to alterations in DNA sequence.

A growing body of research on these “epigenetic” changes are leading geneticists to rethink the conventional view that all human disease is fundamentally tied to DNA sequence variation (changes in the actua

Studying mice, scientists from Johns Hopkins have successfully prevented a molecular event in brain cells that they’ve found is required for storing spatial memories. Unlike regular mice, the engineered rodents quickly forgot where to find a resting place in a pool of water, the researchers report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell.

The experiments are believed to be the first to prove that subtly altering the chemistry of a certain protein can profoundly affect a brain cell&#146

Connections seen to X-linked mental retardation and some forms of leukemia

Most of the time, most of the estimated 35,000 genes in the human genome are silent, securely stored away in the tightly coiled structure of chromatin, which makes up chromosomes. Inside chromatin, the DNA is wound around small proteins called histones, making it unavailable to the cellular machinery that would otherwise read its coded genetic information. Specific cell and tissue types are characterized by the

Exactly fifty years ago, Watson and Crick revealed the structure of DNA, unleashing a scientific revolution. On the anniversary of that momentous discovery, the world’s leading science journal, Nature, will publish new and groundbreaking genetic research by Bangor University scientist, Dr. Isabelle Colson. Isabelle is an expert in evolutionary biology, the study of how life evolves, and for 18 months she was an invaluable part of a Manchester-based team studying mutation in yeast – a seemingly simple

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researches and their colleagues have discovered that escort molecules are required to usher pheromone receptors to the surface of sensory neurons where they are needed to translate chemical cues.

In an interesting twist, the researchers found that the escort molecules belong to a family of proteins, called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays an important role in the immune system. The researchers speculate that in addition to being

Scientists at the University of Manchester have turned back the evolutionary clock to reveal a hidden mechanism for differentiation between species of the same family, according to an article published in the journal Nature this week. The finding sheds new light on how different species may have arisen and questions the very notion of how we define individual species.

The work, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Wellcome Trust, was c