"The average scientist thinks of estrogen as largely mediating gene expression," Eric Prossnitz told BioWorld Today. Estrogen is a steroid hormone, and its classical receptor is a nuclear hormone receptor that acts as a transcription factor once it is activated by estrogen binding.
After injury, zebrafish can send axons across severed spinal cords and regenerate neural connections. Now, researchers from Duke University have identified a molecule that is important for enabling them to do so.
Researchers have been able to significantly improve the heart function of guinea pigs after an experimentally induced heart attack by transplanting the animals with sheets of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived human heart cells.
According to the American Heart Association’s website, “your heart muscle needs oxygen to survive. A heart attack occurs when the blood flow that brings oxygen to the heart muscle is severely reduced or cut off completely.”
Fatty liver is an exception to the rule that early intervention is best. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is now the leading cause of liver failure.
Heat-shock proteins (Hsps) are typically intracellular chaperone proteins that help other proteins fold. But researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute have discovered an extracellular role for Hsp60 in wound healing.
As gene editing of blood stem cells is progressing toward clinical application, one question has been how to make the technology simple and cheap enough to make it a realistic option for the large numbers of patients who could potentially benefit.
By combining immunotherapy targeting the innate and adaptive immune systems, researchers have been able to eliminate large, established tumors in animal models. The four-component therapeutic strategy will "certainly not [be] trivial to translate," co-corresponding author Darrell Irvine told BioWorld Today. But the work is proof of principle that "there is some combination treatment in immunotherapy that allows the elimination of the majority of large tumors in animal models."
N6-methyladenosine or m6A plays an important role in viral infection, according to two separate studies published back to back in the Oct. 20, 2016, issue of Cell Host & Microbe. Methylation is an important epigenetic tag on RNA, and m6A in particular is the most abundant methyl tag found on eukaryotic genomes and plays a role in many biological processes.
