Scientists have used a technique called RNA interference to impair cancer cells’ ability to produce a key enzyme called telomerase. The enzyme, present in most major types of cancer cells, gives cells the lethal ability to divide rampantly without dying. The laboratory experiments create an opportunity for researchers who are focusing on telomerase in a bid to develop a drug like none ever developed – one capable of killing 85 percent of cancers

The research, led by Peter T. Rowley, M.

UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas researchers have taken the first step in defining the sites in human genes most prone to mutation, which eventually could lead to discovery of the genetic bases of many human diseases.

Their work will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Gene and is currently available online.

Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, and his colleagues made their discovery while mining databases of coding single nucle

Over half of solid tumour patients analysed tested positive for cancer cell death

Cyclacel Limited, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company, reported today that it demonstrated through state-of-the-art biomarker technology that CYC202 (R-roscovitine), its lead CDK inhibitor drug candidate, appears to induce cancer cell suicide or apoptosis in patients receiving the drug. Details of the biomarker data obtained with CYC202 were reported today at an oral presentation at the American Asso

’Lizards gone wild’

Despite social notions of race, human populations around the world are genetically so similar that geneticists find no different sub-species among them. The genetic continuity of human populations is the exception rather than the rule for most animal species, however.

Richard Glor, graduate evolutionary biology student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has found extensive genetic differentiation among populations of numero

’The brain’s Timex’

Getting over jet lag may be as simple as changing the temperature –your brain temperature, that is.

That’s a theory proposed by Erik Herzog, Ph.D. assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Herzog has found that the biological clocks of rats and mice respond directly to temperature changes.

Biological clocks, which drive circadian rhythms, are found in almost every living organis

Scouring the genome of a wild Mexican potato, scientists have discovered a gene that protects potatoes against late blight, the devastating disease that caused the Irish potato famine.

The discovery of the gene and its cloning by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was reported today (July 14) in online editions of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The identification of the gene, found in a species of wild potato known as ´ Solanum bulboca