by Mary-Ann Muffoletto, Utah State University Credit: Utah State University Utah State University biochemists Thomson Hallmark and Ryan Jackson, along with collaborators, published two seminal papers this week. Their findings describe the structure and function of a newly discovered CRISPR immune system that—unlike better-known CRISPR systems that deactivate foreign genes to protect cells—shuts down infected cells...
by IMBA- Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Magnification of the mouse cerebellum, the brain region that plays an important role in motor control. Nuclear DNA is shown in blue. In green is the tri-methylation of lysine 9 on histone H3 (H3K9me3), an indicator of silenced heterochromatin. Credit: ©Hagelkruys/IMBA The gene-silencing...
While the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins has been harder to study than protein-coding genes, it has been shown to have vital physiological functions. Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have now developed new high-precision tools able to identify what these noncoding sequences do. The study, which is published in...
by John Hewitt, Medical Xpress Credit: wikipedia Students of physiology are invariably taught that the primary function of myelin is to insulate nerves. In particular, to make action potentials more efficient by increasing the thickness of the membrane and thereby decreasing its electric capacitance. But this crude idea—this analogy, really—can’t be correct. Despite the protestations...
by Will Doss, Northwestern University Fig. 1 EZH2 increases FOXA1 protein stability through physical interaction. (A and B) PCa cells were infected with control (shCtrl) or two independent shEZH2 lentiviruses (shEZH2-C and shEZH2-3′) for 72 hours and subjected to WB. (C) LNCaP cells were infected with the indicated EZH2 lentivirus for 96 hours and analyzed by...
