http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Meet Oliver, the first baby in the world born using a new egg-screening technique that could double the odds of an implanted embryo taking hold in the womb, unveiled by British experts Wednesday. http://www.physorg.com/news171096873.html Medicine & Health Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:56:08 EST news171096873 A process that limits the number of times a cell divides works much differently than had been thought, opening the door to potential new anticancer therapies, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Cell. http://www.physorg.com/news171026279.html Medicine & Health Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:18:25 EST news171026279 Genetic variants in a region on chromosome 9q may influence asthma development in Mexican children, according to research published in the August 28 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. http://www.physorg.com/news170673072.html Medicine & Health Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:30:01 EST news170673072 Parents of healthy newborns often remark on the miracle of life. The joining of egg and sperm to create such delightful creatures can seem dazzlingly beautiful if the chromosome information from each parent has been translated properly into the embryo and newborn. http://www.physorg.com/news169650616.html Biology Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:30:02 EST news169650616 Extra genomes appear, on average, to offer no benefit or disadvantage to plants, but still play a key role in the origin of new species, say scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.physorg.com/news169297932.html Biology Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:13:07 EST news169297932 Janet Davison Rowley, MD, a pioneer in demonstrating that cancer is a genetic disease, will receive the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom the White House announced Thursday. President Barack Obama will award the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to Rowley and 15 others at a ceremony Wednesday, August 12. http://www.physorg.com/news168187760.html Medicine & Health Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:00:02 EST news168187760 Female recipients of kidneys from deceased male donors demonstrate an increased risk of allograft failure in the first year after transplant, but show no increased risk after ten years, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The study authors note that proteins on male donor cells may affect the short term success of kidney transplants in women. http://www.physorg.com/news168092955.html Medicine & Health Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:29:38 EST news168092955 (PhysOrg.com) -- Evidence buried in the chromosomes of animals and plants strongly suggests only one group -- mammals -- have seen their genomes shrink after the dinosaurs' extinction. What's more, that trend continues today, say Indiana University Bloomington scientists in the first issue of a new journal, Genome Biology and Evolution. http://www.physorg.com/news167935854.html Biology Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:50:01 EST news167935854 High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology. Labs get bogged down with particular DNA sentences, tinkering at times with subsections of a single gene ad nauseam before moving along to the next one. http://www.physorg.com/news167833209.html Biology Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:20:43 EST news167833209 Scientists have a better understanding of what causes an abnormal number of chromosomes in offspring, a condition called aneuploidy that encompasses the most common genetic disorders in humans, such as Down syndrome, and is a leading cause of pregnancy loss. http://www.physorg.com/news167307166.html Medicine & Health Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:24:38 EST news167307166 Scientists have long suspected that the sex chromosome that only males carry is deteriorating and could disappear entirely within a few million years, but until now, no one has understood the evolutionary processes that control this chromosome's demise. http://www.physorg.com/news167026463.html Biology Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:15:21 EST news167026463 (Physorg.com) -- A microscopic single-celled organism, adapted to survive in some of the harshest environments on earth, could help scientists gain a better understanding of how cancer cells behave. http://www.physorg.com/news166877793.html Medicine & Health Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:57:02 EST news166877793 (PhysOrg.com) -- Telomeres, the repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of linear chromosomes, have an important function: They protect vulnerable chromosome ends from molecular attack. Researchers at Rockefeller University now show that telomeres have their own weakness. They resemble unstable parts of the genome called fragile sites where DNA replication can stall and go awry. But what keeps our fragile telomeres from falling apart is a protein that ensures the smooth progression of DNA replication to the end of a chromosome. http://www.physorg.com/news166442641.html Biology Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:06:21 EST news166442641 (PhysOrg.com) -- K-fibers, structures long thought to play a key role in the alignment of chromosomes prior to cell division, are not required after all, say Indiana University and New York State Department of Health scientists. http://www.physorg.com/news166113443.html Biology Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:10:01 EST news166113443 Pinpointing the genes involved in human brain cancer can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and sometimes the needle you find may not be the right one. By comparing human and canine genomes, researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered that a gene commonly believed to be involved in meningiomas-tumors that affect the meninges, or thin covering, of the human brain and account for one out of four adult brain tumors -may not be as key for tumor formation as previously thought, and they've narrowed the search for the real culprit. http://www.physorg.com/news166105992.html Medicine & Health Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:33:47 EST news166105992 Declining bumblebee populations are at greater risk of inbreeding, which can trigger a downward spiral of further decline. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology have provided the first proof that inbreeding reduces colony fitness under natural conditions by increasing the production of reproductively inefficient 'diploid' males. http://www.physorg.com/news165736486.html Biology Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:55:14 EST news165736486 A molecule called telomerase, best known for enabling unlimited cell division of stem cells and cancer cells, has a surprising additional role in the expression of genes in an important stem cell regulatory pathway, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The unexpected finding may lead to new anticancer therapies and a greater understanding of how adult and embryonic stem cells divide and specialize. http://www.physorg.com/news165674795.html Medicine & Health Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:40:03 EST news165674795 Dutch researchers have found the first evidence that a process of inactivating the X chromosome during embryo development and implantation, which was known to occur in mice but unknown in humans, does, in fact, take place in human female embryos prior to implantation in the womb. http://www.physorg.com/news165489911.html Medicine & Health Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:30:02 EST news165489911 (PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and University of Adelaide believe our oldest mammalian relative may help us to better understand ovarian cancer. http://www.physorg.com/news165241632.html Medicine & Health Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:50:01 EST news165241632 Research published today in Science Express from the journal Science demonstrates the first definitive link between mutations in the gene DICER1 and cancer. By studying the patterns of DNA from 11 families with an unusual predisposition to the rare childhood lung cancer pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB) investigators found that children with the cancer carried a mutation in one of their two DICER1 gene copies. http://www.physorg.com/news165168698.html Medicine & Health Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:20:01 EST news165168698 Mice who inherit a particular chromosomal duplication from their fathers show many behaviors associated with human autism, researchers report in the June 26th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press Publication. The duplicated chromosomal region in mice is the equivalent of human chromosome 15q11-13, the most frequent cytogenetic abnormality observed in autism, accounting for some five percent of all cases. http://www.physorg.com/news165152905.html Biology Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:49:09 EST news165152905 It is a misinterpretation of the application of the bedrock of scientific naming with regard to the number of moose species that Kris Hundertmark, a University of Alaska Fairbanks wildlife geneticist at the Institute of Arctic Biology, seeks to correct. http://www.physorg.com/news164077998.html Biology Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:15:03 EST news164077998 Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) have identified a key mechanism that causes chromosomes within blood cells to break -an occurrence that marks the first step in the development of human lymphoma. http://www.physorg.com/news164034703.html Medicine & Health Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:11:55 EST news164034703 Researchers at The Wistar Institute have defined a key target of an evolutionarily conserved protein that regulates the process of aging. The study, published in Nature, provides fundamental knowledge about key mechanisms of aging that could point toward new anti-aging strategies and cancer therapies. http://www.physorg.com/news163860006.html Medicine & Health Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:40:25 EST news163860006 Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have quantified the probability of a male who carries a "high normal" variant of the Huntington's Disease (HD) gene having a child who develops the disease. Although thought to be a very rare event, the probability has never been estimated using current information and disease guidelines. The findings, appear on-line in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, may be useful during prenatal genetic counseling. http://www.physorg.com/news163763696.html Medicine & Health Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:55:52 EST news163763696 No human is a clone of their parents but the same cannot be said for other living things. While your DNA is a combination of half your mother and half your father, other species do things differently. The advantage of clonal reproduction is that it produces an individual exactly like an existing one -which would be very useful for farmers who could replicate the best of their animals or crops without the lottery of sexual reproduction. Clonal reproduction of crop species took a step closer to being realised with new research published in PLoS Biology this week. http://www.physorg.com/news163736388.html Biology Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:21:05 EST news163736388 In this week's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, Uppsala University scientists describe a new mechanism behind an important process that causes a rapid reduction of DNA in the chromosomes of bacteria. The findings advance our knowledge of how DNA content has been reduced, which is something that has occurred in bacteria that live as parasites inside the cells of other organisms. http://www.physorg.com/news163699985.html Medicine & Health Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:13:28 EST news163699985 In a new study, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists disprove a century-old theory about why cancer cells often have too many or too few chromosomes, and show that the actual reason may hold the key to a novel approach to cancer therapy. http://www.physorg.com/news163600003.html Medicine & Health Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:27:37 EST news163600003 Whether baby lizards will turn out to be male or female is a more complicated question than scientists would have ever guessed, according to a new report published online on June 4th in Current Biology. The study shows that for at least one lizard species, egg size matters. http://www.physorg.com/news163342512.html Biology Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:56:04 EST news163342512 At the ends of chromosome are special pieces of DNA called telomeres. Think of it as the little tip that caps off a shoelace. The telomeres send signals to the cells to let them know it's the end point, not a break that should be repaired. http://www.physorg.com/news163330100.html Medicine & Health Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:29:03 EST news163330100