Category Biology/Biotechnology

Eating avocado as part of your daily diet can help improve gut health, a new study from University of Illinois shows. Avocados are a healthy food that is high in dietary fiber and monounsaturated fat. However, it was not clear how avocados impact the microbes in the gastrointestinal system or “gut.”

“We know eating avocados helps you feel full and reduces blood cholesterol concentration, but we did not know how it influences the gut microbes, and the metabolites the microbes produce,” says Sharon Thompson, graduate student in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at U of I and lead author on the paper, published in the Journal of Nutrition.

The researchers found that people who ate avocado e...

The type and abundance of bacteria found in the mouth may be linked to lung cancer risk in non-smokers, finds the first study of its kind, published online in the journal Thorax.

Fewer species and high numbers of particular types of bacteria seem to be linked to heightened risk, the findings indicate.

Around one in four cases of lung cancer occurs in non-smokers and known risk factors, such as second hand tobacco smoke, background radon exposure, air pollution, and family history of lung cancer don’t fully explain these figures, say the researchers.

The type and volume of bacteria (microbiome), found in the mouth has been associated with a heightened risk of various cancers including those of the gullet, head and neck, and pancreas.

And the researchers wanted to find out i...

With the help of algorithms, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have identified markers that can differentiate between irritant eczema and contact allergy, two skin reactions that look similar but require different treatment. Their findings, which are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), support the further development of an alternative to today’s diagnostic patch tests.

About 20 percent of the population of high-income countries are troubled by contact eczema, a disease often associated with exposure to chemicals in the working environment...

The results of a pre-clinical study led by researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest how a compound derived from the thunder god vine — an herb used in China for centuries to treat joint pain, swelling and fever — is able to kill cancer cells and potentially improve clinical outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer.

The medicinal plant’s key ingredient, triptolide, is the basis of a water-soluble prodrug called Minnelide, which appears to attack pancreatic cancer cells and the cocoon of stroma surrounding the tumor that shields it from the body’s immune system. Investigators recently published the study results in the journal Oncogenesis.

The study found that the compound’s mechanism of action is the ability of...