It sounds like fodder for an early John Irving novel. But it was published by Cell Press, not Random House or Dutton: "Grizzly Bears Exhibit Augmented Insulin Sensitivity while Obese Prior to a Reversible Insulin Resistance during Hibernation."
The debate continues about how good mouse models of inflammation are, with a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) taking issue with a 2013 report that there is next to no correlation between mouse and human changes in gene expression in several inflammatory disorders.
Scientists from Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) and PTC Therapeutics Inc., with colleagues in academia, reported on small-molecule drugs that improved the symptoms of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) by altering the splicing of the protein SMN2.
The Ebola epidemic continues unchecked for the time being. The World Health Organization reported on Monday that the death toll as of Friday, Aug. 1, stood at 887, with Nigeria reporting its first death from the current outbreak.
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that misfolded proteins can cause damage not just in the cell where they originally misfold. Since scientists first discovered that prion proteins can be infectious, traveling from cell to cell and even organism to organism to organism – causing Scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease in cows and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans – the list of misfolded proteins that can spread reads like a who's who of neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobe dementia.
Wouldn't the NSA just love to have this – if they don't already, that is: a see-through organism. That's what Caltech researchers describe in the July 31, 2014, issue of Cell.
Immunotherapy, which can deliver extremely long-lasting remissions – for all intents and purposes, cures – is transforming cancer care for those patients who respond to it.
Researchers have discovered more than 200 splice variants in a class of enzymes known for its involvement in the synthesis of transfer RNAs, the aminocayl tRNA synthetases (AARSs). Most of those splice variants did not include the catalytic domains that are necessary for specifying tRNAs – a clear indication that their biological function has changed from that of the AARS family.
Psychiatry research as a whole started its week getting a scientific and a financial jumpstart. Both could breathe new life into industry's interest in the area as well.
