News tagged with model organism

Researchers discover method to unravel malaria's genetic secrets

The parasite that causes malaria is a genetic outlier, which has prevented scientists from discovering the functions of most of its genes. Researchers at National Jewish Health and Yale University School of Medicine have ...

Chemistry / Biochemistry

created Jan 25, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Zebrafish may help speed drug discovery

Tiny zebrafish just may give scientists one solution to information overload in the search for new drugs therapies.

Medicine & Health / Research

created Jan 17, 2012 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Microbe metabolism: For the smallest organisms, size determines how microbes spend energy

Every living organism balances a budget of sorts — by allocating energy to various parts of its body to fuel essential life processes. Throughout its lifetime, an organism may rebalance this budget to ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Jan 04, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Physicist creates scale model of LHC ATLAS experiment of out LEGO blocks

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has generated a lot of news of late, e.g. the announcement that a team had found what it believes ...

Physics / General Physics

created Dec 30, 2011 | popularity 3.6 / 5 (17) | comments 19 | with audio podcast report

Climate sensitivity greater than previously believed

Many of the particles in the atmosphere are produced by the natural world, and it is possible that plants have in recent decades reduced the effects of the greenhouse gases to which human activity has given rise. One consequence ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 20, 2011 | popularity 4 / 5 (4) | comments 8

A dance of aerosols: Study shows plant-sourced particles pick and choose their partners

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the complex molecular mixer that is the atmosphere, some molecules dance with others and some are wallflowers, according to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Using a ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Dec 20, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

Aging human bodies and aging human oocytes run on different clocks

Reproductive and somatic aging use different molecular mechanisms that show little overlap between the types of genes required to keep oocytes healthy and the genes that generally extend life span, according to Coleen Murphy, ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Dec 06, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Lessons learned from yeast about human leukemia

The trifecta of biological proof is to take a discovery made in a simple model organism like baker's yeast and track down its analogs or homologs in "higher" creatures right up the complexity scale to people, ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Dec 05, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Researchers engineer blood stem cells to fight melanoma

Researchers from UCLA's cancer and stem cell centers have demonstrated for the first time that blood stem cells can be engineered to create cancer-killing T-cells that seek out and attack a human melanoma. The researchers ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created Nov 28, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

New database for vital model organism launched

A new database promises to be an invaluable resource to scientists who use a unique single-celled fungus to study human diseases.

Biology / Biotechnology

created Nov 28, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Study identifies a key molecular switch for telomere extension by telomerase

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine describe for the first time a key target of DNA damage checkpoint enzymes that must be chemically modified to enable stable maintenance of chromosome ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Nov 23, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (5) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Cancer drug cisplatin found to bind like glue in cellular RNA

An anti-cancer drug used extensively in chemotherapy binds pervasively to RNA -- up to 20-fold more than it does to DNA, a surprise finding that suggests new targeting approaches might be useful, according to University of ...

Chemistry / Biochemistry

created Nov 21, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Researchers use yeast to help piece together human genome sequence jigsaw

Using yeast as a model, a team of Spanish researchers has made predictions about how individuals differ from one another by analysing genome sequences.

Biology / Biotechnology

created Nov 17, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Probiotics appear to mitigate pancreatitis: Surprising hypothetical mechanism warrants further investigation

(Medical Xpress) -- A probiotic treatment appears to mitigate pancreatitis in an animal model, leading to a new hypothesis of how probiotics may act, according to a paper in the November Applied and Environmental Microbiology. ...

Medicine & Health / Research

created Nov 17, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

Genetic screening in yeast reveals new candidate gene for Lou Gehrig's disease

(Medical Xpress) -- Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, is a universally fatal neurodegenerative disease. Mutations in two related proteins, TDP-43 and FUS, cause some forms of ALS. ...

Medicine & Health / Genetics

created Nov 15, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Model organism

A model organism is a species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the organism model will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. In particular, model organisms are widely used to explore potential causes and treatments for human disease when human experimentation would be unfeasible or unethical. This strategy is made possible by the common descent of all living organisms, and the conservation of metabolic and developmental pathways and genetic material over the course of evolution. Studying model organisms can be informative, but care must be taken when generalizing from one organism to another.

For more information about Model organism, read the full article at Wikipedia.
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