Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s could be better understood thanks to insight into proteins linked to such conditions, a study suggests.
Scientists studying thread-like chains of protein – called amyloid fibres – have found that low levels of these proteins may cause more harm to...
Research shows interaction of tau and amyloid-beta in the brain may cause cognitive decline For years, Alzheimer's researchers have focused on two proteins that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's and may contribute to the disease: plaques made up of the protein amyloid-beta, and...
Scientists once thought BAF proteins confined their activity to cellular housekeeping. But then they discovered these complexes do more than help package and maintain DNA in cells: it seems they also suppress tumor development in many types of tissue. Now a new study from Stanford University...
Cancer spread or metastasis can strike unprecedented fear in the minds of cancer patients. The "seed and the soil" hypothesis proposed by Stephen Paget in 1889 is now widely accepted to explain how cancer cells (seeds) are able to generate fertile soil (the microenvironment) in distant organs...
A team of European scientists from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and the Cologne Excellence Cluster on Cellular Stress Responses in Aging-Associated Diseases (CECAD) at the University of Cologne in Germany has taken an important step closer to understanding the root cause...
A multi-institution group of researchers has found new candidate disease proteins for neurodegenerative disorders. James Shorter, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Paul Taylor, M.D., PhD, St...
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I have an egg allergy that bothers me only sometimes. I am able to eat cakes and cookies that contain eggs, but a fried egg gives me a reaction. Why? I read that cooking at a certain temp destroys or alters the proteins in an egg. What temp is this? Is there any way for me to be able to eat a...
Cholesterol plays a key role in regulating proteins involved in cell signaling and may be important to many other cell processes, an international team of researchers has found. The results of their study are reported in the journal Nature Communications. Cholesterol's role in heart disease has...
A Purdue University biochemist has determined the function of a gene that when mutated leads to a genetic variation of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. James Clemens, an assistant professor of biochemistry, found that a gene called VAPB is responsible for transporting...
Researchers at St. Michael's hospital have identified 29 proteins that are likely to be involved in the spread of kidney cancer. The discovery will help physicians recognize which tumours are going to behave more aggressively and provide those patients with more intensive treatment and closer...
New findings reveal the surprisingly complex protein-coding capacity of the human cytomegalovirus, or HCMV, and provide the first steps toward understanding how the virus manipulates human cells during infection. The genome of the HCMV was first sequenced over 20 years ago, but researchers have...
Slimy layers of bacterial growth, known as biofilms, pose a significant hazard in industrial and medical settings. Once established, biofilms are very difficult to remove, and a great deal of research has gone into figuring out how to prevent and eradicate them. Results from a recent MIT study...
The European Drug Initiative on Channels and Transporters (EDICT), which comes to an end this year, focused on membrane proteins. They make up a third of all proteins in every organism and play a key role in many human diseases. Membrane proteins are difficult to study and poorly understood, but...
Students are taught that a protein's 3-dimensional shape is critical to its function, but it turns out that many proteins exist in a state of 'disorder' and yet are functional If you open any biology textbook to the section on proteins, you will learn that a protein is made up of a sequence of...
Two opposing teams battle it out to regulate gene expression on the DNA playing field. One, the activators, keeps DNA open to enzymes that transcribe DNA into RNA. Their repressor opponents antagonize that effort by twisting DNA into an inaccessible coil around histone proteins, an amalgam...
In Cell Stem Cell, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine describe how human epidermal progenitor cells and stem cells control transcription factors to avoid premature differentiation, preserving their ability to produce new skin cells throughout life. The...
Researchers in the biological sciences department in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary have revealed how white blood cells move to infection or inflammation in the body; findings which could help lead to developing drug therapies for immune system disorders. The research is...
Computer-designed proteins are under construction to fight the flu. Researchers are demonstrating that proteins found in nature, but that do not normally bind the flu, can be engineered to act as broad-spectrum antiviral agents against a variety of flu virus strains, including H1N1 pandemic...
Research into how carbohydrates are converted into energy has led to a surprising discovery with implications for the treatment of a perplexing and potentially fatal neuromuscular disorder and possibly even cancer and heart disease. Until this study, the cause of this neuromuscular disorder was...
A research team led by the University of Melbourne has developed a novel technique that tracks diseased proteins behaving badly by forming clusters in brain diseases such as Huntington's and Alzheimer's. The technique published in Nature Methods is the first of its kind to rapidly identify and...