Rockefeller University’s Fernando Nottebohm will receive the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia announced today. The medal recognizes Nottebohm’s discovery of neuronal replacement in the adult vertebrate brain and the elaboration of the mechanism...

Since their discovery, microRNAs have been shown to play a role in the development of many organisms, including plants and insects but, until now, no one had linked them to developmental processes in humans or other mammals. This week, new research from Rockefeller University firmly establishes m...

Antibiotics are great, when they work. Unfortunately, bacteria have a nasty habit of developing resistance to even our most powerful pharmaceuticals. Now, by tracking the staph infection of a single patient during a course of antibiotic treatment, Rockefeller University scientists have discovered...

veryone needs a little push now and then. Even proteins. In new research from Seth Darst’s lab at Rockefeller University, the structure of one of the pushiest proteins in bacteria is finally brought to light. Among the most stable complexes in a cell is the attachment between DNA and RNA polymera...

Scientists have known for years that chromosomal translocations — abnormalities in which a piece of one chromosome breaks off and fuses to another — lead to a type of blood cancer called lymphoma, but little was known about how cells accumulate translocations or defend themselves against them. N...

Most current Alzheimer’s drugs target molecules responsible for memory formation. But while helpful at slowing and even reversing memory loss, this approach doesn’t address the root of the problem: plaques that build amid brain cells, causing them to weaken and die. In back-to-back papers pub...

Heart disease tends to run in families, and scientists have long known that genetics play an important role. Now, new research in mice, from the laboratory of Rockefeller’s Jan L. Breslow, shows that the genetics of heart disease are more complicated than previously thought. In a study led by Dan...

In a discovery that may help shape new treatments for psoriasis, scientists at Rockefeller University have found a new type of immune cell that may be critical in producing inflammation and tissue damage in the skin. Psoriasis occurs when white blood cells react to an unknown trigger and inappro...

To infect, bacteria must first stick. Several proteins on their cell wall surface are there simply to attach themselves to the surrounding tissues of their hosts, such as the warm, moist, inviting ones at the back of your throat. Now new research from Sung Lee and Vincent Fischetti in Rockefeller...

Cells are given life by mitochondria, an organelle that provides them with all the energy they need. But while mitochondria giveth, they also taketh away — when a cell’s time is up, they release molecules that start a cascade ending in death. At least that’s how it works in humans, mice and ot...