Your body's circadian clock is responsible for making sure you stay healthy, by regulating metabolism and carrying out internal housekeeping chores on a steady 24-hour schedule. About 15% of genes are controlled by your bodily clock, including some important ones in your intenstines that keep infectious bacteria like salmonella in check. Dr. Paolo Sassone-Corsi is a professor of biological chemistry at the UC Irvine School of Medicine and Director of UCI's Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism. Together with his colleague, microbiologist Manuela Raffatellu of UCI's Institute for Immunology, the Irvine bio research team has recently published an article in PNAS revealing how the immune system, specifically as it works in your intestinal track, is strongly directed by circadian rhythms. Upset that biological timing and you put yourself at greater risk of getting sick.
[Drs. Sassone-Corsi and RAffatellu, courtesy of Jocelyn Lee / University Communications at UCI]
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Taking into account the school’s latest funding news, in which Colorado State raised $2 million for an agricultural center and the NIH and NSF have given the school a wealth of research funding, Colorado State University may be of interest to biotechnology vendors and lab suppliers hoping to increase scientific product sales leads and market university lab equipment at life science marketing events in the southwest United States.
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One of the reasons cancer is so successful and difficult to treat is that it uses the body's own systems to proliferate, thrive, and hide from attack. Bioresearch scientists out to target cancer are taking a similar approach, building tiny bio-vehicles for locating tumors that reach their destination without setting off a massive immune system alarm or flooding the whole body with toxic chemicals. A team of biochemists at the University of California San Diego led by Dr. Nathan Gianneschi has developed a nanoparticle that assumes a benign shape to travel covertly through the blood system, then, recognizing a tumor, reassembles via an enzymatic cue into a net to attach itself to the cancerous target.
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As humans, our bodies have the ability to naturally regenerate both skin and hair, but we only get two sets of teeth, and that's one set more than many other mammals. Reptiles and fish, on the other hand, have the ability to regrow teeth throughout their lifetime. Though we have guessed that specialized stem cells are involved, the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in these animals have not been well understood until now. A research team at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, led by Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, has recently published an article in PNAS detailing their study into the regrowth of alligator teeth. They chose a crocodilian model because the dentition is well-organized and implanted in sockets of the dental bone, similar to that of mammals (if more extensive) yet with the capacity for renewal. Contributors to the research included colleagues in Georgia, China, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who presumably provided the live research subjects.
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Researchers at the Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research on the Parnassus Campus of the University of California San Francisco have just published the results of two related studies involving differentiated brain cells transplanted into mice. In one case, the cells were human brain cells integrated successfully into a mouse brain; in the other, epileptic mice were cured with specialized mouse brain cells. In both studies the differentiated cells were a type of interneuron progenitor called medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells. Unlike other brain stem cells that can turn into any number of specialized cells, these differentiated MGE cells have a specific function, which is to inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits. These experiments hold promise for future treatment of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and the chronic pain and spasticity caused by spinal cord injury.
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Given the widespread use and abuse of alcohol for recreation, a drug that could interrupt its effects would have enormous value in treating alcoholism. Since addiction is based on stimulating pleasure centers, scientists have been looking for a way to block that interaction between alcohol and the brain. The challenge has been to find a key protein that carries out this transmission and identify its binding site. Now, biologists in the Harris Lab at the University of Texas Austin have made a major research breakthrough validating the importance of certain ligand-gated ion channels in that process and locating a cavity where the binding takes place. Remarkably, they were able to push their research forward thanks to an obscure alpine cyanobacteria recently sequenced in France.
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The University of Utah College of Pharmacy just celebrated the opening of its new 150,000sf research building, the L.S. Skaggs Pharmacy Institute, on Medical Drive South. Located adjacent to the 1965 facility named after the senior Mr. Skaggs, the newly-expanded research institute will continue to advance drug development and teaching excellence, much the way the first Skaggs building vaulted the University into the ranks of top pharmaceutical colleges within a few years of its construction. The college currently ranks #10 out of 125 doctor of pharmacy programs according to US News & World Report. The NIH ranks it #3 in research productivity, and it has been among the top 4 pharmacy colleges in NIH funding every year since 1975. 2012 NIH funding was over $20M. The Skaggs family, through their charitable organization, the ALSAM Foundation, gave $50M towards the building costs of the institute.
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Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have come up with a novel way of removing dangerous toxins from the bloodstream using biomimetic nanosponges. These tiny clean-up particles work by posing as red blood cells, which serves both to evade the body's immune system response to foreign invaders and to attract the toxins to themselves instead of to actual red blood cells. When the toxins have all attached themselves to the nanosponges, they are processed out through the liver without harming the body. The research into this promising therapy comes out of the Zhang Lab in the Jacobs School of Engineering, where in 2011 they pioneered the red blood cell disguise technology for cloaking cancer drug cocktails, allowing the drugs much more time in the body to target diseased cells. Dr. Liangfang Zhang is also on the research faculty of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center.
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The NIH has just announced $5.3M in two new awards through the Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) program to support autism research studies led by two University of California investigative teams, at UCLA and the UC Davis Medical Center MIND Institute. ACE funding is earmarked for large, multi-disciplinary studies into the origins of autism spectrum neurological disorders and avenues for their treatment. In the case of the two latest awardees, one is a clinical behavioral study and one is a study of genetic variants. The $5.3M is initial one-year funding, with extensions of up to five years. The ACE program includes both centers and networks. Centers are made up of multiple investigators at one site working together on a specific research problem; networks include investigative teams from different sites engaged in a focused study. Both UCLA and UC Davis are ACE centers and will lead the current research projects, though in collaboration with colleagues at other research institutions, namely Harvard, UW, Vanderbilt, Emory, Johns Hopkins, and Yale. As with all ACE research, data and findings are collected centrally by the NIH to maximize their availability to the larger research community.
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Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to altering components of biological systems, like genes and cells, towards creating new and revised living things (watch the video below for an introduction). It's arguably the most radical, cutting-edge laboratory science field today, and one that calls on its scientists to grapple with ethics as well as biotechnology. At the forefront of this life science revolution is the University of California Berkeley-led consortium SynBERC: the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, with partner colleagues at UCSF, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Just this week, principal synbio investigators from these institutions came together with industry scientists and ethicists for a symposium on the UCB campus titled Programming Life: the revolutionary potential of synthetic biology, co-sponsored by SynBERC and Discover Magazine. Whether we are going to continue down the road of reengineering life was not the question so much as how we will go about that delicate task and what the implications and promises are of such a bold project.
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