Category Biology/Biotechnology

Schematic diagram showing how a subset of immune cells, named DN2a T cells, mature into DN2b T cells. The maturation of this step is among the earliest in immune cell development and is controlled by the forgotten DNA strands that allow the genome to change its architecture to induce the “Big Bang” of T cell development. In the absence of the “forgotten strands” DN2a cells fail to mature and ultimately after accumulating additional mutations become malignant T cells also named leukemias or lymphomas.
Credit: UC San Diego

Ignored pieces of DNA play a critical role in the development of immune cells (T cells). These areas activate a change in the structure of DNA that brings together crucial elements necessary for T cell formation...

A protein called Cbf-beta plays a critical role in maintaining bone-producing cells. An examination of aged mice showed dramatically reduced levels of Cbf-beta in bone marrow cells, as compared to younger mice. Thus, the researchers propose, maintaining Cbf-beta may be essential to preventing human age-associated osteoporosis that is due to elevated creation of fat cells.

A major health problem in older people is age-associated osteoporosis that increases the risk of fractures. Often this is accompanied by an increase in fat cells in the bone marrow. University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have now detailed an underlying mechanism leading to that osteoporosis. When this mechanism malfunctions, progenitor cells stop creating bone-producing cells, and instead create fat cells...

Physical activity of any kind can prevent heart disease and death, says a large international study involving more than 130,000 people from 17 countries published this week in The Lancet. The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study, led by the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, shows any activity is good for people to meet the current guideline of 30 minutes of activity a day, or 150 min/ week to raise heart rate.

Although previous research, from high income countries, shows leisure time activity helps prevent heart disease and death, the PURE study also includes people from low and middle-income countries where people don’t generally don’t participant in leisure-time physical activity...

Experiments by a team of NIH-funded scientists suggests a potential method for halting the expansion of certain brain tumors. Credit: Image courtesy of Michelle Monje, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University

The growth of certain aggressive brain tumors can be halted by cutting off their access to a signaling molecule produced by the brain’s nerve cells, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. When the signaling molecule neuroligin-3 was absent, or when its signal was interrupted with medication, human cancers called high-grade gliomas could not spread in the brains of mice, the researchers found.

“We thought that when we put glioma cells into a mouse brain that was neuroligin-3 deficient, that might decrease tumor growth to some measurable extent...