Basic Biomedical Sciences News Today

June 26, 2013 — In 2011 and 2012, research from China's Nanjing University made international headlines with reports that after mice ate, bits of genetic material from the plants they'd ingested could make it into their bloodstreams intact and turn the animals' own genes off. The surprising results from Chen-Yu Zhang's group led to speculation…

If circadian rhythms adjusted to every change in light, they would not be very effective in regulating such periodic behaviors as sleep.

10 new faculty members will be hired as part of an effort to bolster faculty diversity

Students from The University of New Mexico and local high schools recently had the opportunity to meet and brainstorm with experts in the field of neuroscience at the Specification of Complex Behaviors symposium held on the UNM campus. Senior...

A new symposium at The University of New Mexico will bring together students and researchers of neuroscience to look at the progress made and brainstorm about the future. Specification of Complex Behaviors will be held Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 30-31,...

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TFF Pharmaceuticals Announces Leadership Transition - read this article along with other careers information, tips and advice on BioSpace

Scientists at the University of Oxford, U.K., use a precise new surface plasmon resonance method to measure very low affinities of T cell receptor binding to self and non-self peptides presented on MHC to show that TCRs are not prefect in their ability to distinguish between healthy and infected cells, as was earlier believed. These new results open new possibilities for treating autoimmune diseases and cancer.

 E-Mail When it comes to distinguishing a healthy cell from an infected one that needs to be destroyed, the immune systems killer T cells sometimes make mistakes. This discovery, described today in eLife, upends a long-held belief among scientists that T cells were nearly perfect at discriminating friend from foe. The results may point to new ways to treat autoimmune diseases that cause the immune system to attack the body, or lead to improvements in cutting-edge cancer treatments. It is wide...

 E-Mail Clinicians and scientists have long observed that cells in overstressed hearts have high levels of the simple sugar O-GlcNAc modifying thousands of proteins within cells. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have found evidence in mouse experiments that these excess sugars could well be a cause, not merely a consequence or marker of heart failure. Their research found that elevated levels of O-GlcNAc made mice more prone to heart failure, but lowering levels of O-GlcNAc restored ...