Like skilled assassins, many diseases seem to know exactly what types of cells to attack. While decimating one cadre of cells, diseases will inexplicably spare a seemingly identical group of neighbors. What makes cells vulnerable or not depends largely on the kinds and amounts of proteins they pr...

A study in rats shows that exposure to a high-fat diet during pregnancy produces permanent changes in the offspring’s brain that lead to overeating and obesity early in life, according to new research by Rockefeller University scientists. This surprising finding, reported in the November 12 issue...

Stem cells don’t just become a part of the liver or the brain in a flash; it takes a complex molecular choreography and requires that specific genes be switched on and off at specific times. Some of these genes are regulated through a process by which proteins in the cell nucleus, called histones...

A teaspoon of dirt contains an estimated 10,000 species of bacteria, but it’s only one percent of these microbial bugs — the ones that can be grown easily in a lab — that have brought us antibiotics, anticancer agents and other useful drugs. The odds favor the other 99 percent for clinical pro...

How do you know if you bleed normally? Scientists at The Rockefeller University Hospital’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) aim to answer that question more definitively with the launch of an assessment tool designed to help physicians and researchers more accurately determine...

Sensory neurons have always put on a good show. But now it turns out they’ll be sharing the credit. In groundbreaking research to appear in the October 31 issue of Science, Rockefeller University scientists show that while neurons play the lead role in detecting sensory information, a second type...

DNA, it has turned out, isn’t all it was cracked up to be. In recent years we learned that the molecule of life, the discovery of the 20th century, did not — could not — by itself explain the huge differences in complexity between a human and a worm. Forced to look elsewhere, scientists turned...

Michel C. Nussenzweig, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology at Rockefeller University, is one of this year’s two winners of the Lee C. Howley Sr. Prize for Arthritis Research. The award will be presented at the Evening of Honors reception of the annual Arthritis Foundation meeting Novem...

The hepatitis C virus is a prolific replicator, able to produce up to a trillion particles per day in an infected person by hijacking liver cells in which to build up its viral replication machinery. Now new research — in which scientists have for the first time used fluorescent proteins to image...

Biologists today are doing what Darwin thought impossible. They are studying the process of evolution not through fossils but directly, as it is happening. Now, by modeling the steps evolution takes to build, from scratch, an adaptive biochemical network, biophysicists Eric D. Siggia and Paul Fra...