News & HighlightsNews
Protecting the brain from overactivity
Alzheimer’s disease, depression and epilepsy all share a problem with a single brain chemical: glutamate. A neurotransmitter, glutamate is critical to the process by which individual brain cells send messages to one another and it plays a key role in learning and memory. Under normal conditions...
Bacteria build walls to withstand antibiotics
Antibiotic resistant bacteria, which are proliferating in hospitals and causing major headaches for physicians, cheat death by finding ways to fortify their cell walls against the deadly drugs. The question is: how? New research from the laboratory of Alexander Tomasz shows that one gene, called ...
High blood pressure linked to gene regulation
Genes, as much as treadmills and salads, dictate blood pressure. But new research from Rockefeller University suggests that even the tiniest changes to our DNA can create a predisposition to hypertension. Scientists have focused much of their efforts to understand high blood pressure on a gene ca...
A single protein is crucial to memory formation, scientists show
In the spaces between brain cells, where the long ends of the cells nearly touch one another, electrical and chemical messages are transmitted at a furious pace. New findings published in August and this week show that a single protein called Nova is responsible for regulating the quality of the ...
Specialized 'GPCR' proteins are the key to protecting the fly brain
In the brain, it's usually neurons that get all the attention. But there's another type of brain cell that's just as critical to our ability to think, walk and process information. It's the glial cell, and without it, neurons wouldn't last long. In a new report published in the October 7 issue of...
Alternative to cloning technique does not yield pure clones, Rockefeller scientists report
When is a clone not a clone? According to new research from Rockefeller University’s Peter Mombaerts, creating mice by a two-step transfer of DNA does not reliably produce animals that are genetic duplicates of an original, and in some cases even creates “cloned” mice of the wrong sex. Scient...
For sex to happen, the right receptors must align
Having sex is largely about being in the right place at the right time. That’s true not only in the singles scene, but also at the molecular level. Research by Rockefeller’s Donald Pfaff, published this week in the online edition ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that the ...
Scientists ID the genetic makeup of hair
Despite a $56 billion industry devoted to caring for and styling hair, we know surprisingly little about how it forms. A new paper in last week’s edition of Public Library of Science Biology from Elaine Fuchs’ laboratory at Rockefeller University begins to tease apart the genes, and the cells,...
Clearing jams in the copy machinery
Bacteria and humans use a number of tools to direct perhaps the most important function in cells -- the accurate copying of DNA during cell division. New research published this week in Molecular Cell from the laboratory of Rockefeller University's Michael O'Donnell, a Howard Hughes Medical Insti...
Humanity in transition
2005, Joel Cohen says, is the midpoint of a historic decade. Before this decade, young people always outnumbered older people; rural residents always outnumbered city dwellers; and the median number of women per child always exceeded two. By the end of this decade, none of this will ever be true ...
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