Biotechnology

Dec. 16, 2012 — A team led by Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has shown for the first time the effectiveness of a new technique that could allow the development of more-specific, cell-based immune therapies for cancer. Their findings were reported online December 16 in Nature Biotechnology . Immunotherapies -- which make use of patients' own immune cells that have been augmented in the laboratory -- have shown some early success in the treatment of blood cancers including certain types of leukemia. For most cancers, however, cell-based therapies have been harder to develop, in large part because it has been difficult for investigators to train immune cells to specifically attack cancer cells without damaging normal, healthy cells in the body. The treatment approach, known as adoptive cell transfer (ACT), involves engineering an immune cell called a T cell. In the ACT pr...

Dec. 16, 2012 — Turning vast amounts of genomic data into meaningful information about the cell is the great challenge of bioinformatics, with major implications for human biology and medicine. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues have proposed a new method that creates a computational model of the cell from large networks of gene and protein interactions, discovering how genes and proteins connect to form higher-level cellular machinery. The findings are published in the December 16 advance online publication of Nature Biotechnology . "Our method creates ontology, or a specification of all the major players in the cell and the relationships between them," said first author Janusz Dutkowski, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Medicine. It uses knowledge about how genes and proteins interact with each other and automatically organizes this information to form a comp...

Dec. 14, 2012 — A new study by NYU School of Medicine researchers suggests that an existing HIV drug called maraviroc could be a potential therapy for Staphylococcus aureus , a notorious and deadly pathogen linked to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations each year. Their study is published online this week in Nature . "What are the chances that a drug for HIV could possibly treat a virulent Staph infection?" asks Victor J. Torres, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology, and senior author of the study. "These findings are the result of a fantastic collaboration that we hope will result in significant clinical benefit." Staph causes toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia, and food poisoning, among other illnesses, and is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. The discovery arose from a serendipitous finding that was a part of a collaborative study between Dr. Torres, a bacteriologist, and immunologist Derya Unutmaz, MD, associa...

Dec. 14, 2012 — At crucial points in the metabolism of all organisms, a protein with the unwieldy name of Translation Elongation Factor P (EF-P, for short) takes center stage. What it actually does during protein synthesis has only now been elucidated -- by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The research group led by Kirsten Jung, Professor of Microbiology at LMU, actually focused on how bacteria cope with stress, for example how the receptor meolecule CadC monitors the acidity in the environment and alerts the cell to take countermeasures to protect itself. However, one day Kirsten Jung found herself asking questions about protein synthesis, the core biosynthetic process that makes all metabolism possible. This arose because she discovered that, in the absence of Elongation Factor P, the cell doesn't make enough CadC to carry out its job effectively. Recovering from a stall How then does EF-P regulate protein synthesis in g...

Dec. 14, 2012 — Researchers have identified the mechanism responsible for generating our fingers and toes, and revealed the importance of gene regulation in the transition of fins to limbs during evolution. Dr. Marie Kmita and her research team at the IRCM contributed to a multidisciplinary research project. Their scientific breakthrough is published today in the journal Science . By combining genetic studies with mathematical modeling, the scientists provided experimental evidence supporting a theoretical model for pattern formation known as the Turing mechanism. In 1952, mathematician Alan Turing proposed mathematical equations for pattern formation, which describes how two uniformly-distributed substances, an activator and a repressor, trigger the formation of complex shapes and structures from initially-equivalent cells. "The Turing model for pattern formation has long remained under debate, mostly due to the lack of experimental data support...

Dec. 13, 2012 — In a study published today in the open access journal PLOS Pathogens , researchers at Emory University have discovered a potentially important mechanism by which the Ebola virus alters and evades the immune response of its infected host. Ebola virus is the causative agent of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever (EHF), a disease with up to 90 percent mortality. While human outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever have been confined to Africa, Ebola virus infections in bats, the presumed natural reservoir of the virus, have also been detected in Europe and Asia. The high lethality of the disease, combined with its short incubation period and the lack of vaccines or effective treatments, makes Ebola virus a significant public health threat as well as a potentially devastating biological weapon. Efforts to develop a vaccine against Ebola virus have been met with limited success, and it is likely that the virus employs complex immune evasion mechanisms that p...

Dec. 13, 2012 — Every time a human or bacterial cell divides it first must copy its DNA. Specialized proteins unzip the intertwined DNA strands while others follow and build new strands, using the originals as templates. Whenever these proteins encounter a break -- and there are many -- they stop and retreat, allowing a new cast of molecular players to enter the scene. Scientists have long sought to understand how one of these players, a repair protein known as RecA in bacterial cells, helps broken DNA find a way to bridge the gap. They knew that RecA guided a broken DNA strand to a matching sequence on an adjoining bit of double-stranded DNA, but they didn't know how. In a new study, researchers report they have identified how the RecA protein does its job. "The puzzle for scientists has been: How does the damaged DNA look for and find its partner, the matching DNA, so that it can repair itself?" said University of Illinois physics profes...