News & HighlightsNews
Protein is linked to functional development of brain neurons
Rockefeller University investigators say that a molecule that helps transport cargo inside nerve cells may have another, critically important, role related to how developing neurons sprout the projections that relay electrical signals within the brain. In the June 6 issue ofÌýThe EMBO Journal, re...
Dendritic cells are replenished from blood
Dendritic cells help direct the body’s immune response by presenting invading antigens to T cells so they know what to attack. But an ongoing debate exists about where dendritic cells originate and how they multiply, especially in the spleen and lymph system. Now, in a paper published in this mon...
Study of staph reveals how bacteria evolve resistance
Antibacterial resistance doesn’t happen overnight. But until recently nobody knew exactly how long it took — or how it happened at all. Now, by studying blood taken from a single patient over a period of months, Rockefeller University researchers have been able to trace how a common strain of ba...
Left-right wiring determined by neural communication in the embryonic worm
Most animals appear symmetrical at first glance, but we’re full of internal lopsidedness. From the hand used to pick up a pencil or throw a baseball, to where language is generated in the brain, to the orientation of our internal organs, humans are a glut of asymmetries. Worms aren’t so differen...
Single circadian clock regulates flies' response to light and temperature
Animals have biological clocks with a cycle of about 24 hours — these circadian rhythms allow them to align their physiology and behavior to the earth’s rotation. Now new research from Rockefeller University shows that the same molecular clock responsible for helping flies sync themselves with p...
Mice on Prozac help scientists find better depression treatments
Depressed mice, like depressed humans, often appear listless and antisocial — the result of aberrant levels of brain chemicals such as serotonin. The most commonly prescribed antidepressant drugs, Prozac and other drugs of its class, act to normalize levels of serotonin. But by comparing mice tha...
New study reveals inner workings of a molecular clamp critical to DNA replication
From bacteria to humans, every organism must replicate its DNA. This basic process, which occurs millions of times a day in an average mammal, is driven by three core protein complexes that act as tiny machines, zipping along an unwound strand of DNA to assemble a duplicate copy. New research fro...
Building the nuclear pore piece by piece
The nuclear pore complexes are the sole gatekeepers for the cell’s nucleus — proteins, RNA, viruses, anything that passes between the nucleus and the rest of the cell has to use one of these giant protein assemblies. But exactly how each of the almost 2,000 pores that are embedded in the nuclear...
Dendritic cells may be key to reversing diabetes
When the body’s own immune system begins to assault the cells in the pancreas responsible for producing insulin, the result is type 1 diabetes. Now, researchers studying the immune system’s dendritic cells in mice have found a way to stop the destruction and help revive and maintain the populati...
Density does it: Fibrinogen concentration controls clot formation
When blood clots over a wound, the resulting scab is the product of an intricate molecular dance between cell fragments called platelets in the blood and the glycoprotein fibrinogen. Fibrinogen sticks to the wound's surface, and when platelets float by the fibrinogen it turns on a receptor on the...
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