Amyloid and tau proteins are both involved in the disease pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnostic and treatment research focus has long been on amyloid, which has proven almost entirely fruitless after decades of effort. But tau is becoming better understood, as investigational tau imaging agents offer the ability to visualize its presence in the brain.
A mitochondrial glutamine transporter variant of the SLC1A5 gene is a key regulator of glutamine metabolism and metabolic reprogramming in cancer cells, and targeting such transporters could be a new strategy for controlling tumor growth, Korean researchers reported online in the Dec. 19, 2019, edition of Cell Metabolism.
Genome sequencing is enabling new insights into the genetic aspects of health and disease that have touched just about every aspect in biomedicine. It is also, like the “skin”-colored crayons of yore, disproportionately focused on the Caucasian segment of the population. And that is a loss for everyone.
In the Dec. 20, 2019, issue of Science, Stefan Kaufmann, who is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and his colleagues report that the immune system could calibrate its response to Pseudomonas aeruginosa by monitoring the bacterial quorum sensing chatter.