UCLA researchers Tamer Sallam, left, and Peter Tontonoz expect that further exploration will lead to new insights into normal physiology as well as disease.

So-called ‘selfish’ gene acts to remove cholesterol from blood vessels. Scientists have identified a gene that may play a protective role in preventing heart disease. Their research revealed that the gene, called MeXis, acts within key cells inside clogged arteries to help remove excess cholesterol from blood vessels. Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the UCLA-led study in mice found that MeXis controls the expression of a protein that pumps cholesterol out of cells in the artery wall.

MeXis is an example of a “selfish” gene, one that is presumed to have no function because it does not make a protein product...

The image shows a metastatic colon tumour infiltrated by the immune system (brown) after combined treatment with the TGF-beta inhibitor and immunotherapy. (Author: Daniele Tauriello, IRB Barcelona)

Immune system-stimulating treatments combined with a TGF-beta inhibitor are effective against colon cancer. Researchers have developed a mouse model that mimics advanced human colon cancer. This model has allowed them to study the immune system response for the first time. In a short space of time, immunotherapy, that is to say therapies based on stimulating the immune system against cancer cells, has become a powerful approach to treat cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer. However, to date, most colon tumours appeared to be unresponsive to this kind of therapy...

ALMA revealed the rotation of the torus very clearly for the first time. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

High resolution observations show a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of such rotating donuts-shape structures was first suggested decades ago, but this is the first time one has been confirmed so clearly. This is an important step in understanding the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

Researchers have known for a long time that the more massive the galaxy is, the more massive the central black hole is. This sounds reasonable at first, but host galaxies are 10 billion times bigger than the central black holes; it should be difficult for two objects of such vastly different scales to directly affect each other...

Magnetic field lines emanate from a pair of supermassive black holes nearing merger within a large gas disk in a simulation by RIT scientists. Periodic light signals in the gas disk could someday help scientists locate supermassive binary black holes. Credit: RIT Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation

Multimessenger astrophysics. A new simulation of supermassive black holes – the behemoths at the centers of galaxies – uses a realistic scenario to predict the light signals emitted in the surrounding gas before the masses collide, said Rochester Institute of Technology researchers...