News & HighlightsNews
New faculty member wants to know how flies make decisions
Fruit flies are not known for their sense of direction. Even among animals with tiny brains, they are particularly prone to sudden, sharp changes of direction and circuitous navigation. But their abrupt movements are not accidental. Understanding how they decide when to veer right or left is imp...
Gene identified that prevents stem cells from turning cancerous
Stem cells, the prodigious precursors of all the tissues in our body, can make almost anything, given the right circumstances. Including, unfortunately, cancer. Now research from Rockefeller University shows that having too many stem cells, or stem cells that live for too long, can increase the o...
Research on killer HIV antibodies provides promising new ideas for vaccine design
Rockefeller researchers have made two fundamental new discoveries about the immune defenses of a rare group of HIV patients whose bodies can naturally keep the virus at bay. By detailing the molecular workings of so-called broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies, the researchers hope their work...
Patterned pulses boost the effects of deep brain stimulation, research shows
Electrical stimulation has been used as a sort of defibrillator of consciousness, rousing a victim of traumatic brain injury to at least partial awareness, after years in a coma. The procedure, termed deep brain stimulation, has also been used to treat Parkinson’s disease and has shown some pr...
Scientists identify protein that spurs formation of Alzheimer’s plaques
In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is amyloid-β, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of amyloid-β have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cell...
Experiments decipher key piece of the ‘histone code’ in cell division
Reproduce or perish. That’s the bottom line for genes. Because nothing lives forever, reproduction is how life sustains itself, and it happens most fundamentally in the division and replication of the cell, known as mitosis. Now new research at Rockefeller University has detailed a key role in mi...
MicroRNAs play a role in cocaine addiction
MicroRNAs, already linked to cancer, heart disease and mental disorders such as schizophrenia, may also be involved in addiction. A team of Rockefeller University neuroscientists has shown that a protein that plays a crucial role in the regulation of microRNAs, short stretches of RNA that silenc...
Protein found to control the early migration of neurons
Long before a baby can flash her first smile, sprout a first tooth or speak a first word, the neurons that will form her central nervous system must take their first, crucial steps. And these steps must be careful to take the right neurons to the right places and avert developmental disasters th...
Muscle gene may provide new treatments for obesity and diabetes
Skeletal muscle enables us to walk, run or play a musical instrument, but it also plays a crucial role in controlling disease. Rockefeller University scientists have now shown how a specific molecule in skeletal muscle regulates energy expenditure, a finding that may lead to new treatments for c...
Researchers identify DNA damage repair gene in Fanconi anemia pathway
After more than a century of technological refinements, zippers still get stuck. So do the molecular machines that routinely unzip the double helix of DNA in our cells after billions of years of evolution, and the results can be lethal. In research to be published July 30 in Molecular Cell and a...
View
View