A drug commonly used to treat osteoporosis in humans also stimulates the production of cells that control insulin balance in diabetic mice, researchers have found. While other compounds have been shown to have this effect, the drug (Denosumab) is already FDA approved and could more quickly move to clinical trials as a diabetes treatment.
A little more than a decade ago, researchers discovered that all cells secrete tiny communications modules jammed with an entire work crew of messages for other cells. Today, a team of researchers is harnessing the communications vesicles excreted by stem cells and using them to induce the damaged heart to repair itself.
Young children are just as likely to respond to the needs of another individual as they are to their own, new research shows.
Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease, all result in part from a defect in autophagy – one way a cell removes and recycles misfolded proteins and pathogens. Researchers show for the first time that the formation of ephemeral compartments key in this process require actin polymerization by a complex of seven proteins, which creates ‘comet tails.’
Every cell in the body uses phosphorylation, the process of adding a chemical tag to control a protein’s function and fate, such as when it moves from one part of a cell to another or binds to other proteins. Now, researchers have made a surprisingly simple discovery: The modification of more than 100 secreted proteins is the work of a single enzyme called Fam20C.
More than 200 additional genomes from Ebola virus samples have been sequenced by an international team of researchers, in order to capture the fullest picture yet of how the virus is transmitted and how it has changed over the long-term outbreak.
Study shows broad health benefits from periodic use of diet that mimics fasting in mice and yeast – which appear to translate to humans, also.
Adult neural stem cells, which are commonly thought of as having the ability to develop into many type of brain cells, are in reality pre-programmed before birth to make very specific types of neurons, at least in mice, according to a study.
Researchers have teased apart the molecular basis for differences in behavior between healthy cells and those from patients with a cardiac condition and identified a drug treatment that partially restores function to diseased cells.
