News by Subject Biology

An increased proportion of Indigenous American (IA) ancestry was associated with a greater incidence of HER2-positive breast cancer, according to a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

In the future, treating a concussion could be as simple as cooling the brain. That's according to research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers, whose findings support the treatment approach at the cellular level.

In a new study published in GLIA , Virginia Tech neuroscientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC describe how the common Toxoplasma gondii parasite prompts the loss of inhibitory signaling in the brain by altering the behavior of nearby cells called microglia.

A new study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology found that human-induced environmental stressors have a large effect on the genetic composition of coral reef populations in Hawai'i. They confirmed that there is an ongoing loss of sensitive genotypes in nearshore coral populations due to stressors resulting from poor land-use practices and coastal pollution. This reduced genetic diversity compromises reef resilience. 

Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. 'Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists,' wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true.

You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It's also a metaphor for what scientists call the 'gut-brain axis,' a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.

In a paper published this week in Science, an international team of scientists share details of the most ancient fossil of Homo erectus known and discuss how these new findings are forcing us to rewrite a part of our species' evolutionary history.

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, working with Spanish, French, and German colleagues, have determined and analyzed the high-resolution structure of a protein from the recently discovered heliorhodopsin family. Microbial rhodopsins play a key role in optogenetics -- a technique that uses light to control nerve and muscle cells in living tissue.

A prevalent heart protein known as cardiac myosin, which is released into the body when a person suffers a heart attack, can cause blood to thicken or clot--worsening damage to heart tissue, a new study shows. A team led by John H. Griffin, PhD, a professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, made the unexpected finding after a series of experiments spanning three years and involving researchers from multiple collaborating institutions.