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RNA (yellow) strikes rapidly towards the uppermost layer of the mind alongside the trail of neural stem cells (crimson). Duke researchers visualized this phenomenon in residing cells, and located protein implicated in Fragile X syndrome is vital to this RNA transit system. Credit score: Louis-Jan Pilaz, Duke College Duke College scientists have caught the primary glimpse of molecules shuttling alongside a form of freeway operating the size of neural stem cells, that are essential to the event of recent neurons. This new view has given them an intriguing clue protein poor in Fragile X syndrome, an autism-related dysfunction that causes mental incapacity, is chargeable for transferring at the least a few of this molecular cargo up and down the stem cells. The findings seem on-line Dec. 1 in  Present Biology . "The transferring molecules we noticed in these stem cells may very well b...

Outcomes are typically poor f or older patients with advanced blood cancers, and new therapies are desperately needed to help patients with these cancers achieve remission," said Mark Frattini, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and blood cancer specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian. "While our study was small, the response we saw in this phase I, dose-escalating trial was encouraging." Previously, Frattini and colleagues had used a proprietary chemosensitivity screening assay to demonstrate that combining thioguanine and decitabine -- chemotherapy drugs that are commonly used as single agents to treat patients with AML -- restored therapeutic efficacy in leukemia cells from patients with relapsed and/or refractory disease. In this study, the researchers tested the efficacy of the combination therapy in 12 older patients (median age of 67 years) with relapsed or chemotherapy refractory AML or chronic myelomonocytic l...

Background Blood-forming stem cells, or hematopoietic stem cells, are found in the bone marrow. These cells have two unique properties: They can self-renew and, through a process called differentiation, they can form any type of blood cell. A healthy immune system depends on the regenerative abilities of hematopoietic stem cells. Common cancer therapies such as chemotherapy and radiation can eliminate cancer by killing cancer cells. But these treatments also damage hematopoietic stem cells, which can impede the cells' ability to regenerate blood, slowing the immune system and resulting in a longer, more complicated recovery for people with cancer. Previous research indicated that certain genes may alter hematopoietic stem cells' regenerative capacity by either accelerating or hindering the cells' ability to restore the immune system, but more research was needed to pinpoint the specific genetic activity and effects. Method One of the new studies focused on a ge...

The ability to convert cells from one type to another holds great promise for engineering cells and tissues for therapeutic application, and the new Wisconsin study could help speed research and bring the technology to the clinic faster. The new approach, published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) , uses a library of artificial transcription factors to switch on genes that convert cells from one type to another. Natural transcription factors are cellular molecules that bind to DNA to turn genes on and off. They help determine cell fate, meaning that if a cell is destined to be a skin cell, a heart cell or an eye cell, different transcription factors switch on specific sets of genes that program the cell to attain one state or another. Using artificial transcription factors made in the lab, researchers are trying to find which ones best mimic these natural changes in cell fate. "Our interest in changing cell fate comes from understanding how c...

"Knowing how cells respond to mechanical cues in the living embryo and how they physically sculpt tissues and organs in the 3D space will transform the way we think about developmental processes," said Otger Campàs, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB and senior author on the paper that reports this novel technique in  Nature Methods . "Importantly, this knowledge will help us better understand healthy tissue homeostasis and the wide range of diseases that involve abnormal tissue mechanics, especially cancer." The growth and development of a living organism is a choreography of cellular movements and behaviors that follow internal genetic guidelines and specific biochemical and mechanical signals. All these events conspire over time to create a variety of complex forms and textures that make our tissues and organs functional. Scientists have focused for decades on the role of biochemical cues in embryonic development, Campàs said, b...

The finding, which appears in the December 5, 2016, issue of  Nature Structural & Molecular Biology , deepens our understanding of stem cell biology and could help advance stem cell-based therapies, especially related to aging and regenerative medicine. "This work shows that the optimal length for telomeres is a carefully regulated range between two extremes," says Jan Karlseder, a professor in Salk's Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory and senior author of the work. "It was known that very short telomeres cause harm to a cell. But what was totally unexpected was our finding that damage also occurs when telomeres are very long." Telomeres are repetitive stretches of DNA at the ends of each chromosome whose length can be increased by an enzyme called telomerase. Our cellular machinery results in a little bit of the telomere becoming lopped off each time cells replicate their DNA and divide. As telomeres shorten over time, the chromosomes themselve...