Science and Health News

Protein aggregates are deemed to be one reason for the death of nerve cells in disorders such as Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease. As researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry report in the current issue of Nature, they have now decoded a new cellular mechanism for the development of aggregates. Missing stop signals in the production of proteins lead erroneously to long lysine chains at the end of the protein. This in turn blocks the ribosomes, the cell’s protein factory. Healthy cells detect blocked ribosomes and rapidly destroy useless proteins. If the necessary quality control machinery does not function properly, defective proteins accumulate and form toxic aggregates.

A worldwide team of senior scientists and clinicians have come together to produce an editorial which indicates that certain microbes — a specific virus and two specific types of bacteria — are major causes of Alzheimer’s Disease. Their paper, which has been published online in the highly regarded peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, stresses the urgent need for further research — and more importantly, for clinical trials of anti-microbial and related agents to treat the disease.

University of Louisville School of Dentistry researchers have found a bacterial species responsible for gum disease, Porphyromonas gingivalis, is present in 61 percent of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). The findings, published recently in Infectious Agents and Cancer, only detected P. gingivalis in 12 percent of tissues adjacent to the cancerous cells, while this organism was undetected in normal esophageal tissue.

The process of ageing begins even before we are born, according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge. In a study using rats to model pregnancy and fetal development, the researchers also found that providing mothers with antioxidants during pregnancy meant that their offspring aged more slowly in adulthood.

The first gene identified for greying hair has been discovered by an international UCL-led study, confirming greying has a genetic component and is not just environmental.

Duke University researchers have engineered microbes that can’t run away from home; those that do will quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed «swarmbots» for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. The approach could also be used to reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, such as releasing specific molecules on cue.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans. Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

TAU finding suggests genetic predisposition to cancer already existed in pre-modern era The modern plagues of obesity, physical inactivity and processed food have been definitively established as modern causes of colon cancer. Researchers have also associated a mutation of the Adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene with the deadly disease. But which came first? Is colon cancer a lethal product of modernity? Or is this an open-and-shut case of DNA gone awry?