Category Biology/Biotechnology

Researchers have found a consistent cholesterol-lowering effect for soy protein, with pooled data from dozens of clinical trials that span the last two decades. The study calls into question the US Food and Drug Administration’s current proposal to revoke the health claim for soy protein and heart disease.

“At no time since the original claim for soy as a reducer of serum cholesterol has its ability been in question,” says David Jenkins, professor of nutritional sciences and of medicine at U of T. “It’s been consistent since 1999. The data have not changed.”

The researchers showed a reduction from soy in both total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which can damage the heart...

Synthetic bacterial memory circuits enable microbial diagnostics for sensing biomolecules in the gut...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied which genes are expressed in overactive immune cells in mice with asthma-like inflammation of the airways. Their results, which are published in the journal Immunity, suggest that the synthesis and breakdown of fats plays an important part in the process.

In asthma, the immune system is overactive, causing inflammation in the lungs and symptoms such as coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. The Th2 cell plays a vital part in asthma-related inflammation, but the rarity of these cells and a lack of sensitivity technology has made these cells hard to study in any detail.

Resear...

A new study identifies the species of bacteria in the human infant gut that protect against food allergies, finding changes associated with the development of food allergies and an altered immune response.

Every three minutes, a food-related allergic reaction sends someone to the emergency room in the U.S. Currently, the only way to prevent a reaction is for people with food allergies to completely avoid the food to which they are allergic. Researchers are actively seeking new treatments to prevent or reverse food allergies in patients...