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Call it systems biology -- it's a revolutionary idea with a clunky label / Determining why some people get sick and others don't points to preventive health care
I'm sneezing and feeling miserable with the first flu I've had in years. My muscles throb, and I have a fever that's caused a bead of sweat to trickle down my forehead into my left eye. Exactly what happens at the molecular level when my body becomes...
2008-11-10 10:05:22
Pursuit of Happiness: Your Behavior
New science shows that happiness is about our behavior, not just our biology.
2008-11-08 18:10:17
Being gay can boost fertility, at least in beetles
Washington, Nov 5 ANI: In a surprising finding, scientists have discovered that homosexual activity in male flour beetles can actually boost their chances of reproducing, says a new study.The researchers also found that beetles, through their homosexual encounters, transfer their semen to another male, and may in turn fertilise a female they may have never encountered.While homosexual behaviour has long been seen in flour beetles, scientifically known as Tribolium castaneum, the new study is the first one to find the reason behind such a tendency."We noticed that these male beetles spent quite a lot of time in this seemingly counterproductive behaviour and wondered what was going on, so we set up some experiments to find out," National Geographic quoted lead author Sara Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, as saying.Organisms including insects, penguins, and primates, display homosexual behaviour, and researchers have laid out many hypotheses behind such tendencies.While some have attributed the male behaviour as a need to practice breeding before meeting females, others claim that males need to get rid of old, less effective sperm before they encounter females.In fact, there are some scientists who claim that homosexual behaviour is a method of exerting social dominance over other males.To find out which hypothesis holds true, researchers marked individual males and females, then tracked their sexual exploits and simultaneously monitoring the paternity of any offspring born in the group. They found that out of all the hypotheses, only one justified the homosexual behaviour among flour beetles-as males were dribbling sperm onto each other, it suggested that they might be getting rid of the old sperm and preparing the arsenal of fresh sperm for their next female encounter.Also, the researchers found that if one male leaked semen on another male and the semen-covered male later bred with a female, the female's eggs could become fertilized with the sperm of the male she had never encountered.The fact that a male could inseminate a female without directly breeding with her came as a big surprise. Thus, one can say that the flour beetles' homosexual behaviour yields a direct reproductive benefit, allowing males to inseminate females without expending time or energy having sex with them. "We could not believe these results when we first saw them, so we ran the experiment over and over again to make sure it was actually happening," said Lewis.The findings of the study appear in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. ANI
2008-11-05 03:00:00
WASHINGTON
INT13International/Health/ScienceSame gene is different in different tissuesWashington, Nov 3 IANS A gene is known to produce slightly different versions of the same protein by skipping or including certain sequences from the messenger RNA, knowledge that may be significant in the fight against cancer. Now, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT team has shown that this phenomenon, known as alternative splicing, is far more prevalent and varies more between tissues than was previously suspected. About 94 percent of human genes generate more than one form of their protein products, said the MIT team. Scientists' previous estimates ranged from a few percent 10 years ago to 50-plus percent more recently."A decade ago, alternative splicing of a gene was considered unusual, exotic. . . but it turns out that's not true at all - it's a nearly universal feature of human genes," said Christopher Burge, co-author of the paper and an associate professor of biology and viological engineering at MIT.Burge and his colleagues also found that in most cases the mRNA produced depends on the tissue where the gene is expressed. The work paves the way for future studies into the role of alternative proteins in specific tissues, including cancer cells.They also found that different people's brains often differ in their expression of alternative spliced mRNA isoforms, according to an MIT release. The findings were reported in Sunday online edition of Nature. --Indo-Asian News ServiceSt/jg251 Words03111042
2008-11-03 03:00:00
Science Briefing: Marking time with bacteria
US researchers have created a stable 'genetic clock' of a test-tube full of bacteria emitting pulses of light, which is a big advance for the fledgling science of synthetic...
2008-11-03 01:20:25
Linus Pauling Medal to UCSB Chemistry Professor
Thomas Bruice lauded for lifetime or work, and for bridging chemistry and biology.
2008-11-02 02:44:20
A new chapter in science and technology at Huntington Library
"Beautiful Science: Ideas That Changed the World," a permanent exhibit dedicated to books...
2008-11-01 09:03:30
Breakthrough to nip transplant rejection in the bud
INT20International/Health/ScienceBreakthrough to nip transplant rejection in the budLondon, Oct 31 IANS A chance discovery by biologists will help trick the immune system into believing that a transplanted organ is the body's own, not a foreign element, nipping its rejection in the bud. The scientists confirmed the two-way transfer of a molecule called MHC that instructs the immune system to tell "self" from "non-self". By disrupting this, transplanted organs should become "invisible" to the host's immune system, hence out of the pale of attacks.Such an advance would be a major medical breakthrough because current methods of preventing organ rejection involve weakening the host's immune system, which can lead to life-threatening infections.The researchers made this discovery when they transplanted kidneys or hearts from one set of mice into another, with each set of mice having a different version of the molecule being studied. They then conducted tests to see if the molecules were transferred. In the recipient mice, the donated kidneys or hearts and the host tissue expressed both types of molecules. This is the first time that this transfer has been shown to happen in a living system.Wilson Wong, senior researcher from King's College London, said that "that this study will lead to a better understanding of the immune system to benefit the development of new therapies in areas related to transplantation.""The medical potential of this finding is enormous," says Gerald Weissmann, a doctor and editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal, which carried the report."Understanding molecular miscegenation desegregation should not only make transplantation more widespread and effective, but also shed light on how microbes disrupt our body's immune apparatus for distinguishing self from non-self," he added. The FASEB Journal http://www.fasebj.org is published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology FASEB and is the most cited biology journal worldwide, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.--Indo-Asian News ServiceSt/jg333 Words31101220
2008-10-31 03:03:08
Annoying allergies may actually offer defense against cancer
Washington, Oct 30 ANI: Allergies are much more than just an annoying immune malfunction, they may protect against certain types of cancer, suggests a new study.According to a new article in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, allergy symptoms may protect against cancer by expelling foreign particles, some of which may be carcinogenic or carry absorbed carcinogens, from the organs most likely to come in with contact them.In addition, allergies may serve as early warning devices that let people know when there are substances in the air that should be avoided.The article has been produced by researchers Paul Sherman, Erica Holland and Janet Shellman Sherman from Cornell University. Medical researchers have long suspected an association between allergies and cancer, but extensive study on the subject has yielded mixed, and often contradictory, results. Many studies have found inverse associations between the two, meaning cancer patients tended to have fewer allergies in their medical history. Other studies have found positive associations, and still others found no association at all.In an attempt to explain these contradictions, the Cornell team reexamined nearly 650 previous studies from the past five decades. They found that inverse allergy-cancer associations are far more common with cancers of organ systems that come in direct contact with matter from the external environment-the mouth and throat, colon and rectum, skin, cervix, pancreas and glial brain cells. Likewise, only allergies associated with tissues that are directly exposed to environmental assaults-eczema, hives, hay fever and animal and food allergies-had inverse relationships to cancers.Such inverse associations were found to be far less likely for cancers of more isolated tissues like the breast, meningeal brain cells and prostate, as well as for myeloma, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and myelocytic leukemia.The relationship between asthma and lung cancer, however, is a special case. A majority of the studies that the Cornell team examined found that asthma correlates to higher rates of lung cancer. "Essentially, asthma obstructs clearance of pulmonary mucous, blocking any potentially prophylactic benefit of allergic expulsion," they explain. y contrast, allergies that affect the lungs other than asthma seem to retain the protective effect. So if allergies are part of the body's defense against foreign particle invaders, is it wise to turn them off with antihistamines and other suppressants The Cornell team says that studies specifically designed to answer this question are needed. ANI
2008-10-30 03:02:25
Brain Makes Tennis Call Error More Likely
The eyes often don&amprsquo;t have it. Tennis referees, for example, sometimes mess up when calling a ball in or out. And a new study finds that refs are much more likely to make a mistake by calling a good ball out than by calling a bad ball in. The research...
2008-10-29 07:13:44