Life Sciences and Chemistry

Mutants from a lowly weed. That’s where many solutions to maladies – from salt stress in plants to HIV in humans – may lie in wait for scientists to discover.

“I look for mutants. I take a sick plant and find out what’s wrong,” said Dr. Hisashi Koiwa, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station horticulturist.

It’s the Arabidopsis plant, a common weed, that attracts Koiwa and other researchers because of its simple genetic makeup. Scientists have looked at every nook and cranny of the

Unlike humans, bears seem to recover from bone loss caused by inactivity
Wild black bears may hold some secrets to preserving bone in humans.

Researchers at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Michigan Technological University recently studied the animal’s unique ability to rebound from significant bone loss suffered each year during hibernation. Their study, published in the March 2003 issue of Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research, shows that wild black bea

Arf gene became more effective in stemming cell growth when it joined forces with p53

Researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have looked back in evolutionary time and identified what may be a gene that was once only moderately effective in slowing down cellular reproduction, until it linked up with a more efficient set of genes to create a powerful anti-cancer response.

The gene, called Arf, was already known to have cancer-suppressing activity. Arf respon

Some of the most important compounds are the shortest lived — transient molecules that exist for only thousandths of a second or less during chemical reactions. Characterization of such “reaction intermediates” can play a key role in understanding the mechanisms by which molecules change, shedding light on processes ranging from basic chemical reactions to complex diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Yet by their very nature, reaction intermediates exist for brief periods too short to be seen by most

Genomic rearrangements discovered using DNA microarrays are expected to reveal genetic regions important to human health

Mountain View, CA ¾ March 3, 2003 ¾ Perlegen Sciences, Inc. today announced the publication of a scientific paper in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Genome Research. The paper, “Genomic DNA insertions and deletions occur frequently between humans and nonhuman primates,” describes novel findings suggesting that genomic rearrangements, not single base pa

In order for the body to grow, reproduce and remain cancer free, the cells of the body must have a mechanism for both detecting DNA damage and a feedback mechanism for telling the rest of the cell’s machinery to stop what it’s doing until the damage may be fixed. This feedback mechanism relies on checkpoints during different stages of the cell’s division cycle. Eric Brown and David Baltimore at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) have now further defined how the ATR k