Scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) have found a fast and effective way to investigate important aspects of human ageing. Working at the University of Oxford and The Open University, Dr Lynne Cox and Dr Robert Saunders have discovered a gene in fruit flies that means flies can now be used to study the effects ageing has on DNA. In new work published today in the journal Aging Cell, the researchers demonstrate the value of this model in helping us to understand the ageing process. This exciting study demonstrates that fruit flies can be used to study critical aspects of human ageing at cellular, genetic and biochemical levels.

Dr Lynne Cox from the University of Oxford said: “We study a premature human ageing disease called Werner syndrome to help us understand normal ageing. The key to this disease is that changes in a single gene (called WRN) mean that patients age very quickly. Scientists have made great progress in working out what this gene does in the test tube, but until now we haven’t been able to investigate the gene to look at its effect on development and the whole body. By working on this gene in fruit flies, we can model human ageing in a powerful experimental system.” … Continue Reading »

Your fate can be determined by tiny events. Imagine you live in the city and you walk everywhere to get exercise – you are healthy and not afraid of getting mugged. You almost never eat breakfast so you don’t stop at the donut shop on the way to work, until one day the manager replaces the girl at the counter with her pretty red-haired younger sister. This seemingly unimportant change in your world is just enough to overcome your ability to resist high-fat temptation. A million donuts later, your cholesterol level surges and then your heart gives out. Curse you, little red-haired girl!

Like staff change at the donut shop, subtle, seemingly inconsequential differences in human genetic design can lead to some unexpected tipping points in cellular chemistry that can lead to disaster. Cellular processes, like all the routines of life, are unfathomably complex, constantly evolving, and are sometimes dramatically sensitive to the smallest of changes. Consider the case of Alzheimer’s disease… … Continue Reading »

A mutated gene has been discovered as the key behind epilepsy and mental retardation specific to women, thanks to new research at Adelaide’s Women’s & Children’s Hospital and the University of Adelaide, Australia.

The world-first discovery, published today in Nature Genetics, shows that although men carry the ‘bad’ gene, only women are affected.

The research has been led by Dr Leanne Dibbens and Associate Professor Jozef Gecz from the Department of Genetic Medicine, Women’s & Children’s Hospital, and the Discipline of Paediatrics at the University of Adelaide. The discovery is a result of a major international collaboration involving the Sanger Institute in Cambridge (UK), Wellcome Trust (UK) and many other collaborators in Australia, the United States, Ireland and Israel. … Continue Reading »

More than 600 million years of evolution has taken two unlikely distant cousins – turkeys and scallops - down very different physical paths from a common ancestor. But University of Leeds researchers have found that a motor protein, myosin 2, remains structurally identical in both creatures.

The discovery suggests that the tiny motor protein is much more important than previously thought – and for humans it may even hold a key to understanding potentially fatal conditions such as aneurisms.

Says Professor Knight of the University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences: “This is an astonishing discovery. Myosin 2’s function is to make the smooth muscle in internal organs tense and relax involuntarily. These creatures have completely different regulatory mechanisms: the myosin in a turkey’s gizzards allows it to ‘chew’ food in the absence of teeth, while that in a scallop enables it to swim. Yet they have exactly the same structure.” … Continue Reading »

While it has long been known that embryonic stem cells have the ability to develop into any kind of tissue-specific cells, the exact mechanism as to how this occurs has heretofore not been demonstrated. Now, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and elsewhere have succeeded in graphically revealing this process, resolving a long-standing question as to whether the stem cells achieve their development through selective activation or selective repression of genes.

The collaborative research group, which included Dr. Eran Meshorer of the Department of Genetics at the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has revealed that the embryonic stem (ES) cells express large proportions of their genome “promiscuously.” This permissive expression includes lineage-specific and tissue-specific genes, non-coding regions of the genome that are normally “silent,” and repetitive sequences in the genome, which comprise the majority of the mammalian genome but are also normally not expressed. … Continue Reading »

Now that the genome (DNA) of humans and many other organisms have been sequenced, biologists are turning their attention to discovering how the many thousands of structural and control genes — the “worker bees” of living cells that can turn genes on and off — function.

To do that, they need to develop new techniques and tools. Scientists in the Optical Microscopy group at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada and the University of California, San Diego, have done just that, and in the process have produced back-to-back articles in the prestigious journal Nature Methods. … Continue Reading »

There’s no doubt about it … the platypus is one odd duck-billed, egg-laying, lactating mammal. With adaptations like webbed feet to fit its aquatic lifestyle and the poison spurs that decorate males, the platypus represents for many a patchwork of evolutionary development. But LSU’s Mark Batzer, along with an international consortium of scientists led by Wes Warren at Washington University in Saint Louis, Mo., has taken this theory to an entirely new level, proving that platypus looks aren’t only skin-deep – their DNA is an equally cobbled-together array of bird, reptile and mammalian lineages.

The consortium conducted the first analysis of platypus DNA in what was the largest platypus population genetics study to date. … Continue Reading »

An undergraduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has learned very quickly that a spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down. In fact, with his invention, the sugar may actually be the medicine.

Among the most important and complex molecules in the human body, sugars control not just metabolism but also how cells communicate with one another. Graduating senior Jeffery Martin has put his basic knowledge of sugars to exceptional use by creating a lab-on-a-chip device that builds complex, highly specialized sugar molecules, mimicking one of the most important cellular structures in the human body — the Golgi Apparatus.

“Almost completely independently he has been able to come closer than researchers with decades more experience to creating an artificial Golgi,” said Robert Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. ’59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer and Martin’s adviser. “He saw a problem in the drug discovery process and almost instantly devised a way to solve it.” … Continue Reading »