News

Providing rodents with more space, an exercise wheel, toys and company before an injury helped to ‘prime’ their cells, making it more likely their damaged nerves would regenerate following spinal injury.

All cells possess a cytoskeleton which allows them to move and maintain their shape. Scientists recently showed that a part of this cytoskeleton called branched actin is also essential to cell proliferation: this actin transmits information to cells on whether they should proliferate. If the necessary conditions are not met, these actin fibres are not synthesized, and the cell does not divide – except in the case of cancerous cells, which can override this control mechanism.

A research team has identified reliable markers of gene activity. The discovery has potential for future applications in clinical practice.

Americans spend more than a billion dollars on teeth whitening products each year. Although these products can make smiles brighter, new research shows that they might also be causing tooth damage.

Researchers created the first dense molecular map of B. humidicola, a robust and environmentally friendly forage grass. They also pinpointed the candidate genes for the plant’s asexual reproductive mechanism, which is a huge asset for plant breeders.

The oldest publicly-available strain of the cholera-causing bacterial species, Vibrio cholerae, has had its genetic code read for the first time by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators. The bacterium was isolated from a British soldier during World War One (WWI) and stored for over 100 years before being revived and sequenced.

Scientists have developed a new imaging technology to visualize what cells eat, which could aid the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer.

Wildlife detectives aiming to protect endangered species have long been hobbled by the near impossibility of collecting DNA samples from rare and elusive animals. Now, researchers have developed a method for extracting genetic clues quickly and cheaply from degraded and left-behind materials, such as feces, skin or saliva, and from food products suspected of containing endangered animals.

New research has revealed how the famous tumour suppressor gene p53 is surprisingly critical for development of the neural tube in female embryos.

A ‘hit-and-run’ interaction between two proteins could be an important trigger for cell death.