News & HighlightsNews
Common immune cell marker shown to be off target
A marker that scientists have depended on for over 15 years to pick out a group of immune cells in the skin has been misidentifying them, Rockefeller University scientists report. In order for scientists who study psoriasis and other skin disorders to understand the inner workings of disease, the...
From frogs to humans, brains form the same way
It’s a critical juncture in an embryo’s development: the moment that a brain and nervous system begin to form from a mass of unspecialized cells. Scientists had believed that mammals and amphibians, distinctly different animals, have distinctly different developmental patterns when it comes to t...
Food supply affects bacteria's response to temperature
As a population of bacteria grows, it can become desperate. When their food supply dwindles, bacteria must either forage for new sources of nutrients or slow their metabolism. That’s why, at a critical bacterial concentration,Escherichia coli use a chemical signal to collectively swim from warm a...
Mice use specialized neurons to detect carbon dioxide in the air
For mice, carbon dioxide often means danger — too many animals breathing in too small a space or a hungry predator exhaling nearby. Mice have a way of detecting carbon dioxide, and new research from Rockefeller University shows that a special set of olfactory neurons is involved, a finding that m...
Blood-clotting protein may be new target for Alzheimer's drugs
Despite the rapid rise of Alzheimer’s disease — the Alzheimer’s Association predicts as many as 7.7 million cases by 2030 — there are no preventative treatments available, few in the pharmaceutical pipeline, and those drugs being developed all share the same two molecular targets. Now Rockef...
Two proteins found on telomeres control DNA damage response pathways
No sooner had cells evolved linear chromosomes than they had a life-threatening problem to solve. To the machinery that repairs broken DNA, chromosome ends look a lot like breaks in need of mending, so they could elicit a DNA damage response that would ultimately be lethal to cells. Telomeres, se...
Initial trigger is not enough to determine a cell's fate
Disturbing a stem cell from its initial quiescent state was once thought to taint its gold-standard properties. However, research uncovering how a signaling pathway regulates stem cell behavior reveals that stem cells, once activated, enter a window of time during which they respond to their envi...
New method better identifies functionally related genes on the bacterial chromosome
The moment a bacterial pathogen makes contact with its host, its goal is simple: to infect. To do the job, it has to turn a specific array of genes on and off and show a little know-how in adapting to its new environment. A new tool developed at Rockefeller University allows scientists to identif...
Chromosomes are responsible for a critical enzyme's activation during cell division
In a dividing cell, chromosomes interact with cellular scaffolding — called spindle microtubules — in order to move themselves to opposite ends of the cell, ensuring that both daughter cells receive an exact copy of their parent cell’s genetic material. The microtubules that form this scaffold...
MicroRNA works with Ago2 protein to regulate blood cell development
MicroRNAs became the stars of the RNA universe when, in 2001, scientists found that these short RNAs can control whether or not genes are expressed. This month, provocative new findings cast new light on the genesis of these key biological regulators and how they carry out their function. While m...
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