Molecular switch tagged posts

Brown fat burns fuel to make heat, and this activity is controlled by the body clock: It drops during sleep and rises before waking. But a cold morning or a skipped meal makes demands the clock never planned for. How the body keeps to a fixed energy timetable while still improvising has long been a puzzle.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) now show that SLC25A34, a little-studied protein in the mitochondria of fat cells, acts as a switch that connects the body clock, temperature and diet to how fat cells store and spend energy. The study was published in Science.

“We usually think of the body clock, the response to temperature and the response to food as separate systems...

Researchers have identified a molecular mechanism that helps explain why growing up in a stimulating environment enhances memory. In contrast, a lack of stimulation can impair it. The team from the Institute for Neurosciences (IN), a joint research center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH), was led by researcher Ángel Barco.

Their study, conducted in mice and published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that the environment during childhood and ado...

Scientists from the Antibody and Vaccine group at the University of Southampton have discovered a way to transform antibody drugs previously developed to treat autoimmunity into antibodies with powerful anti-cancer activity through a simple molecular “switch.”

This work, published in the journal Cancer Cell, focuses on a molecule called CD40 which is present on the surface of immune cells and controls both autoimmunity and cancer. In autoimmunity, CD40 is thought to be over-stimulated, increasing the chance of the immune system attacking healthy tissues; whereas in cancer, CD40 is believed to be under-stimulated, enabling tumour cells to evade the immune system. Targeting of CD40 with antibody drugs is ongoing in therapeutic interventions for both diseases.

Accordingly, antibody...

Chronic inflammation, which results when old age, stress or environmental toxins keep the body’s immune system in overdrive, can contribute to a variety of devastating diseases, from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to diabetes and cancer.

Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified a molecular “switch” that controls the immune machinery responsible for chronic inflammation in the body. The finding, which appears online Feb. 6 in the journal Cell Metabolism, could lead to new ways to halt or even reverse many of these age-related conditions.

“My lab is very interested in unde...