News by Subject Biology

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.

Live, single-cell imaging shows cellular 'memory' of growth factor availability throughout the cell cycle (and not just snapshot of growth factor availability) influences cells' decision to replicate.

In the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the tau protein is a major culprit. Found abundantly in our brain cells, tau is normally a team player -- it maintains structure and stability within neurons, and it helps with transport of nutrients from one part of the cell to another.

Cells will ramp up gene expression in response to physical forces alone, a new study finds. Gene activation, the first step of protein production, starts less than one millisecond after a cell is stretched -- hundreds of times faster than chemical signals can travel, the researchers report.

The causes of 40% of all cases of certain medulloblastomas -- dangerous brain tumors affecting children -- are hereditary. These are the findings of a recent genetic analysis carried out by scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and numerous colleagues around the world. A genetic defect that occurs in 15% of these children plays a key role by destabilizing the production of proteins. The researchers suspect that protein metabolism defects could be a previously underestimated cause of other types of cancer.

Genetic information from an 800.000-year-old human fossil has been retrieved for the first time. The results from the University of Copenhagen shed light on one of the branching points in the human family tree, reaching much further back in time than previously possible.