Life Sciences and Chemistry

Educators and scientists should discard the idea that a cell’s nucleus is just a bag of chromosomes, according to Johns Hopkins’ cell biologist Kathy Wilson, Ph.D. In a Feb. 17 session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Denver, Wilson and five others will introduce visual evidence of the nucleus’s newly recognized importance.

“The old view is that the nucleus is simply a warehouse for chromosomes,” says Wilson, associate

New molecular technologies, some driven by the work of a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are exposing unexpectedly high levels of DNA folding and complex protein-rich assemblages within the nucleus of cells that he says “seriously challenge the textbook models.”

“What we are seeing suggests that there may be machinery, not yet identified, that controls the folding and the movements of enzymes that turn genes on and off,” said Andrew Belmont, a professor of cell

Researchers from Imperial College London, University of Oxford, Kagoshima University (Japan) and University of the Ryukyus (Japan) have discovered the mechanism by which human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1), the virus which causes adult T-cell leukaemia, spreads through the body.

Previously it was not understood how HTLV-1 was able to spread between cells and pass between individuals, but according to research published today in Science, the virus spreads by subverting normal T-cell (a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are beginning to unravel how a mysterious sixth sense guides animal attraction. The scientists have made the first-ever recordings of patterns of brain activity in a mouse as it explores the sex and identity of a newly encountered animal.

The research team, led by Lawrence C. Katz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University Medical Center, recorded the firing of neurons in the accessory olfactory bulb, part of a poorly under

When it comes to visual entertainment, three-dimensional viewing can be quite eye-opening. So, too, in science where a recent finding involving University of Iowa researchers used three-dimensional imaging to understand how a bacterial enzyme can take oxygen from air and use it to convert certain molecules into useful chemicals.

Specifically, the scientists saw that naphthalene dioxygenase, a bacterial enzyme, can bind oxygen (to iron) in a side-on fashion and add it on to naphthalene, a hy

If you sniff a rose this Valentine’s Day, your brain will recognize almost a hundred different molecules that collectively give the flower its heady scent-but how? Scientists are now discovering how the brain identifies odors and their mysterious counterparts, the pheromones. New research, to be presented today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting and forthcoming in the journal, Science, explains how the mouse brain is exquisitely tuned to recognize an