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ASGT 12th Annual Meeting: Incorporate Gene Therapy To Make Stem Cell Treatment Safer, More Effective
Gene therapy should be used in tandem with stem cell therapy to enhance the reliability of stem cells, provide an opportunity to limit adverse effects and increase treatment success, according to research presented at the American Society of Gene Therapy"s 12th Annual Meeting, May 30.

Triathletes' Sperm Being Damaged By High Levels Of Cycling Training
The high-intensity training undertaken by triathletes has a significant impact on the quality of their sperm, the 25th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology heard 29 June. Professor Diana Vaamonde, from the University of Cordoba Medical School, Cordoba, Spain, said that the triathletes who did the most cycling training had the worst sperm morphology.
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Swiss Initiative In Systems Biology Launches New Projects
In the second call for proposals, projects focus on either the development of new technologies or on the interface between biomedical research and genomics. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) approved six RTD-projects today. They will engage a total of 47 research groups from both Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Zurich und EPF Lausanne), as well as from the Universities of Basel, Lausanne, Geneva and Zurich. The Friedrich-Miescher Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation is also represented as the only privately financed institution. Eight groups belong simultaneously to one of the above-mentioned universities and to the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics.
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The Downside Of Microtubule Stability - Study Shows Stalled Microtubules Might Be Responsible For Some Cases Of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease

Stalled microtubules might be responsible for some cases of the neurological disorder Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, Tanabe and Takei report in the June 15, 2009 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology. A mutant protein makes the microtubules too stable to perform their jobs, the researchers find. The mutations behind CMT disease slow nerve impulses, reduce their strength, or both. One of these mutations leads to production of faulty dynamin 2, a protein that is crucial for endocytosis but also latches onto microtubules. Tanabe and Takei investigated how defective dynamin 2 hampers cells. Normal microtubules are continually extending and shrinking. But microtubules from cells that made the faulty version of dynamin 2 were abnormally stable, as measured by how many acetyl groups were attached to them. The researchers also found that blocking normal dynamin 2 with RNAi had the same effect as the mutation, confirming that one of dynamin 2"s functions is to promote microtubule turnover. Removing dynamin 2 shattered the Golgi complex, Tanabe and Takei discovered. Dynamic microtubules help construct the Golgi complex in two ways: they capture the vesicles that combine to form a mature Golgi complex; and they provide a track along which these vesicles can travel to their rendezvous point near the nucleus. By breaking up the Golgi apparatus and then watching the fragments reunite, the researchers found that dynamin 2 was essential for the capture step, not for transportation. Dynamin 2 also clings to microtubules of the mitotic spindle, and the team next wants to determine whether the protein regulates microtuble dynamics during the cell cycle. Notes: About the Journal of Cell Biology Founded in 1955, the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB) is published by the Rockefeller University Press. All editorial decisions on manuscripts submitted are made by active scientists in conjunction with our in-house scientific editors. JCB content is posted to PubMed Central, where it is available to the public for free six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their published works and third parties may reuse the content for non-commercial purposes under a creative commons license. For more information, please visit http://www.jcb.org or visit the JCB press release archive at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/rupress. Tanabe, K., and K. Takei. 2009. J. Cell Biol. doi:10.1083/jcb.200803153. Rita Sullivan Rockefeller University Press


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