La Jolla, CA – We often make unwise choices although we should know better. Thunderstorm clouds ominously darken the horizon. We nonetheless go out without an umbrella because we are distracted and forget. But do we? Neurobiologists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies carried out experiments that prove for the first time that the brain remembers, even if we don’t and the umbrella stays behind. They report their findings in the Oct. 20th issue of Neuron.
La Jolla, CA – Delving ever deeper into the intricate architecture of the brain, researchers at The Salk Institute have now described how two different types of nerve cells, called neurons, work together in tiny sub-networks to pass on just the right amount and the right kind of sensory information.
La Jolla, CA – Polio survivors – who were afflicted with poliomyelitis in the years or months before the vaccine to prevent this often-crippling disease became available in 1955 – are invited to attend a special symposium, at 3 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 27, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
La Jolla, CA – In mice, that had been genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease, scientists were able to reverse the rodents’ memory loss by reducing the amount of an enzyme that is crucial for the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
La Jolla, CA – Perhaps you can teach an old mouse new tricks, after all. But be sure to pick an active one.
La Jolla, CA – In many patients with type 2 diabetes, the liver acts like a sugar factory on overtime, churning out glucose throughout the day, even when blood sugar levels are high. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered a key cellular switch that controls glucose production in liver cells.
La Jolla, CA – Surprising new insights about the acid pH levels required for anthrax toxin to invade the cells of the body may help accelerate development of medications for the treatment of anthrax, a disease caused by a spore-forming bacterium.
La Jolla, CA – Shutting down a master activator of the body's inflammatory response – which is the goal of several experimental drugs now in development for the treatment of arthritis – may create even more inflammation with its associated pain and swelling in the body.
La Jolla, CA – The continual and inevitable shortening of telomeres, the protective “caps” at the end of all 46 human chromosomes, has been linked to aging and physical decline. Once they are gone, so are we. But there are more ways than one to grow old.
La Jolla, CA – Every neurobiology textbook invariably states that nerve cells communicate with each other through synapses, the specialized cell-cell contacts found at the end of the cells’ threadlike extensions. In this week’s journal Science, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and the University of California at San Diego report that nerve cells, or neurons, may not have to rely on traditionally defined synapses to “talk” to each other.
La Jolla, CA – Over the next five years, the Salk Institute will be a training ground for a total of 30 selected post-doctoral researchers from Spain, in the science of stem cell biology.
La Jolla, CA – For many years, scientists tried to glean information about the nervous system by recording the electrical activity of one brain cell at a time. Because even the simplest functions of the nervous system involve many thousands of neurons, recording the activity of individual or only a handful of nerve cells does not provide a full picture.
La Jolla, CA – Ronald M. Evans, Ph.D., professor and head of the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, will receive the 2005 Grande Médaille D’Or (Grand Gold Medal), France’s highest scientific honor, for his research discovering how hormones and drugs control the body’s metabolism, development and reproduction.
La Jolla, CA – The cellular cascade of molecular signals that instructs cells with fatally damaged DNA to self-destruct pivots on the p53 tumor suppressor gene. If p53 is inactivated, as it is in over half of all human cancers, checks and balances on cell growth fail to operate, and body cells start to accumulate mutations, which ultimately may lead to cancer. Not surprisingly, the regulation of this vital safeguard has been studied in great detail for many years but mainly in tissue culture, or in vitro, models.
La Jolla, CA – Nature is a seemingly endless storehouse of interesting – and potentially life-saving – biological molecules. But tracking down and harvesting those chemicals in their natural form can be time-consuming, expensive and unreliable.
La Jolla, CA – Brains are marvels of diversity: no two look the same – not even those of otherwise identical twins. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found one explanation for the puzzling variety in brain organization and function: mobile elements, pieces of DNA that can jump from one place in the genome to another, randomly changing the genetic information in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly different ways.
La Jolla, CA – Geoffrey M. Wahl, Ph.D., professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, recently was elected the 2006-07 president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the world’s oldest and largest professional organization dedicated to accelerating scientific progress to prevent and cure cancer.
La Jolla, CA – The mysterious, highly infectious prions, which cause the severe destruction of the brain that characterizes ‘mad cow disease’ and several human brain degenerative disorders, can be rendered harmless in the laboratory by a slight alternation of the three-dimensional conformation or shape of the prion protein’s structure.
La Jolla, CA – To ignite a life-threatening infection in the body, a virus such as HIV invades body cells by first merging, or fusing, with the cell’s outer membrane. Once inside the cell, the invading microbe’s genetic material takes over, turning the ‘host’ cell into a factory to produce more copies of the virus, which then spill out to invade other cells in the body.
La Jolla, CA – A newborn baby moves, breathes and cries in part because a network of nerves called motor neurons carry signals from the infant’s brain and spinal cord to muscles throughout its body.
