Research identifies key enzyme target to fight deadly brain cancers

brain cancer

Researchers have found that targeting an enzyme called PGM3 can help stop the growth of glioblastoma, the most dangerous type of brain tumor. Study findings are published online in the journal Science Advances.

This enzyme plays a vital role in the hexosamine synthesis pathway, which is involved in the processes of protein and lipid glycosylation that allow tumors to rapidly grow. Lipid glycosylation is a process where sugar molecules attach to fats (lipids) in the body.

Researchers with The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center—Arthur G. James and Richard J. Solove Research Institute believe that targeting PGM3 can reduce tumor growth and eliminate glioblastoma cells.

“This research is important because it has found a new target called PGM3...

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Magnetic fields can map the universe—here’s how

Running Chicken Nebula Credit: ESO

Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful? Astronomers are able to use magnetic fields to map our environment within the Milky Way using a technique called Faraday rotation.

It works like this. There’s a bunch of dust—literal dust grains—floating within the galaxy.

Well, I say there’s a lot of dust, but it’s at very, very low densities. Thankfully, the volumes within interstellar space are so vast that the total amount of dust can really add up. And all these little dust grains have little magnetic fields associated with them, because all the grains are made of electric charges and they’re spinning around themselves.

When light from distant sources passes through the dust, that light encounters all these little magnetic fields...

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Throwing a ‘spanner in the works’ of our cells’ machinery could help fight cancer, fatty liver disease… and hair loss

mitochondria
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge, have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate—a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars—into our mitochondria.

Known as the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier, this molecular machine was first proposed to exist in 1971, but it has taken until now for scientists to visualize its structure at the atomic scale using cryo-electron microscopy, a technique used to ...

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Novel technique overcomes spurious correlations problem in AI

ai
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

AI models often rely on “spurious correlations,” making decisions based on unimportant and potentially misleading information. Researchers have now discovered these learned spurious correlations can be traced to a very small subset of the training data and have demonstrated a technique that overcomes the problem. The work has been published on the arXiv preprint server.

“This technique is novel in that it can be used even when you have no idea what spurious correlations the AI is relying on,” says Jung-Eun Kim, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University.

“If you already have a good idea of what the spurious features are, our technique is an efficient and effective...

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