La Jolla, CA – Mothers have long exhorted their children to eat their fruit and vegetables. But once kids are beyond mom’s watchful eye, the hated greens often go the way of Barbie dolls and power rangers. Now, there’s another reason to reach for colorful fruits past adolescence.
La Jolla, CA – Opposing ball clubs don’t take the field at the same time, and neither do teams of proteins responsible for creating the eye. While one team builds the retina, in adjacent cellular turf the opponents are busy constructing the cord that carries visual signals to the brain. And these guys aren’t supposed to mingle.
La Jolla, CA – A microscopic green alga helped scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies identify a novel function for the retinoblastoma protein (RB), which is known for its role as a tumor suppressor in mammalian cells. By coupling cell size with cell division, RB ensures that cells stay within an optimal size range.
La Jolla, CA – Ever watch a jittery video made with a hand-held camera that made you almost ill? With our eyes constantly darting back and forth and our body hardly ever holding still, that is exactly what our brain is faced with. Yet despite the shaky video stream, we usually perceive our environment as perfectly stable.
La Jolla, CA – A los niños con síndrome de Williams, un trastorno genético poco común, les encanta la música y pasan horas escuchándola o creándola. A pesar de tener un coeficiente intelectual promedio de 60, muchos poseen una gran memoria para las canciones, un sentido del ritmo asombroso y la agudeza auditiva que les permite distinguir entre diferentes marcas de aspiradoras.
La Jolla, CA – Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Ph.D., has been awarded the highly prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for her pioneering work on telomeres, the structures that protect chromosome ends, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced on Saturday.
La Jolla, CA – Dr. Ronald M. Evans, profesor y jefe del Laboratorio de Expresión Génica del Instituto Salk de Estudios Biológicos, fue galardonado con el prestigioso Premio Harvey en Salud Humana del Technion-Instituto Israelí de Tecnología, la principal universidad de ciencia y tecnología de Israel.
La Jolla, CA – The latest generation of cancer chemotherapeutic drugs specifically targets mutant enzymes or “oncoproteins” that have run amok and now promote uncontrolled cell growth. As promising as these drugs are, cancer cells with their backs against the wall have the tendency to fight back. A major goal of cancer research is to frustrate these acts of cellular desperation.
La Jolla, CA – Dr. Richard J. Krauzlis and Dr. Edward M. Callaway have been selected for the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neurosciences Award. The awards support scientists working on new and unusual approaches to understand brain function.
La Jolla, California – Una colaboración entre investigadores del Instituto Salk de Estudios Biológicos y la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles ha logrado determinar el patrón de metilación del ADN a nivel genómico de la planta Arabidopsis thaliana – la “rata de laboratorio” del mundo vegetal – de un solo golpe.
La Jolla, CA – In times of plenty, the uni-cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum leads a solitary life munching on bacteria littering the forest floor. But these simple creatures can perform heroic developmental acts: when the bacterial food supply dries up, Dictyostelium amebas band together with their neighbors and form a multi-cellular tower designed to save the children.
La Jolla, CA – Using molecules involved in insect molting, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have created a laboratory method that can quickly turn off neurons in the brain and spinal cord of live animals - and can just as rapidly switch them back on.
La Jolla, CA – Whether newborn nerve cells in adult brains live or die depends on whether they can muscle their way into networks occupied by mature neurons. Neuroscientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies pin-pointed the molecular survival gear required for a young neuron to successfully jump into the fray and hook up with other cells.
La Jolla, CA – Unlike the Three Musketeers who lived by the motto “All for one, one for all,” plant hormones prefer to do their own thing. For years, debate swirled around whether pathways activated by growth-regulating plant hormones converge on a central growth regulatory module. Now, the cooperation model is challenged by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They show that each hormone acts largely independently in the Aug. 11 issue of Móvil.
La Jolla, CA – Like most neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s disease usually appears late in life, raising the question of whether it is a disastrous consequence of aging or if the toxic protein aggregates that cause the disease simply take a long time to form.
La Jolla, CA – A natural chemical that has been ignored by researchers largely because of the runaway success of the blockbuster statin drugs may in fact yield a rare twofer: a prime target for novel cholesterol-lowering drugs and the blueprint for a new generation of antibiotics that can take down Streptococcus pneumonia y Staphylococcus aureus.
La Jolla, CA – Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has been named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. He is one of only 15 researchers in the country to receive the honor this year. The distinction comes with a $240,000 award provided over four years to support his research on the molecular basis of circadian timekeeping mechanisms in mammals.
La Jolla, CA – Despite their celebrated “immortality,” the capacity of embryonic stem (ES) cells for endless division has its limits. After a very extended childhood spent dividing in a culture dish, even stem cells tend to grow up and assume adult roles as workaday nerve, muscle, or blood cells, never to return to their youthful state.
La Jolla, CA – Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified a novel pathway that regulates the body’s ability to store or burn fat, a discovery that suggests new ways to reduce obesity, diabetes and other fat-related human diseases.
La Jolla, CA – During embryonic development, nerve cells hesitantly extend tentacle-like protrusions called axons that sniff their way through a labyrinth of attractive and repulsive chemical cues that guide them to their target.
