For research purposes, the molecule JQ1 is being given away literally for the asking by its makers. But that doesn't mean it's a free-for-all as far as the medical potential of its molecular cousins is concerned.
In today's issue of Nature, scientists reported whole-genome data of the HeLa cell line. The cell line is famous among scientists for the insights into biology it has enabled – and among the general public because the cells were taken without consent from Lacks or her family. The Lacks family did not become aware of the fact that Henrietta Lacks' cells were being used for research until decades after the fact.
In neural projections, what goes up must not necessarily come down. But researchers at the University of Montreal have identified one instance in which it does – and they believe their findings could have implications for Parkinson's disease.
"We are used to thinking of depression as a mental illness, or those of us that are more biologically inclined, as a brain disorder," Owen Wolkowitz told his audience during a recent talk at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on "Getting Old Before Our Time: Psychiatric Illnesses and Accelerated Cell Aging."
A new mouse model combines transgenes and tweaks to the innate immune system to make "a mouse model with heritable susceptibility to hepatitis C," Alexander Ploss told BioWorld Today.
By applying an approach that is more commonly used in fruit flies and worms to mice, researchers have identified several new pathways that are disturbed in the autism spectrum disorder Rett syndrome. One of those pathways turned out to be cholesterol biosynthesis, and statins improved the symptoms of mice with Rett syndrome.
Axl and Mer are oncogenic receptor tyrosine kinases. That much is clear. "They transform cells, and they play a role in migration, invasion and metastasis," Sourav Ghosh told BioWorld Today.
The tumor suppressor PTEN is "probably second only to P53 in the number of deletions and mutations we see in cancer," Vuk Stambolic told BioWorld Today.
