Yeast News and Research

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Enzyme Cdk1 may lead to new cancer therapies

With a four-year, $707,000 grant from the American Cancer Society, Yanchang Wang, assistant professor of biomedical sciences in the Florida State University College of Medicine, hopes to learn how a particular enzyme could possibly help put the brakes on the runaway cell division process that occurs in many forms of cancer.

27 Feb 2008

New discovery on how gene-regulatory networks govern metabolism

Metabolism is a central feature of life - a myriad of biochemical processes that, together, enable organisms to nourish and sustain themselves.

26 Feb 2008

Discovery of 'overdrive' protein could broaden drug design options

New research by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows for the first time that an important family of proteins known to function at the cell surface also functions at a site within the cell.

13 Feb 2008

Moss protein plays role in Alzheimer's disease

Preventing Alzheimer's from developing is a goal of Raphael Kopan, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and pharmacology at the Washington University School of Medicine.

11 Feb 2008

MIT applies engineering approach to studying biological pathways

An MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system.

7 Feb 2008

Isocitric acid from fermentation of sunflower oil - a new building block for pharma?

The citric acid cycle, one of the most important metabolic processes in our bodies, was formulated in 1937. Since then, all of the intermediates have been produced in multigram quantities - with one exception, (2 R,3S)-isocitric acid.

4 Feb 2008

Novel method for assigning probabilities to human protein interactions

The Stowers Institute's Proteomics Center has published a novel method of using normalized spectral counts derived from a series of affinity purifications analyzed by mass spectrometry (APMS) to generate a probabilistic measure of the preference of proteins to associate with one another.

25 Jan 2008

Case researcher in RNA biology makes waves by challenging current thinking

In the January 18th issue of Molecular Cell, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine researcher Kristian E. Baker, Ph.D. challenges molecular biology's established body of evidence and widely-accepted model for nonsense-mediated messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) decay.

21 Jan 2008

Diet and lifestyle critical to recovery

Diet and lifestyle may play a much more significant role in a person's ability to respond favourably to certain drugs, including some cancer therapies, than previously understood, say scientists.

From The University of Manchester 18 Jan 2008

Cancer stem cell marker also drives transcription in normal cells

New research links the recently discovered function of a multi-faceted transcriptional complex to control of gene expression in both normal cells and cancer stem cells.

18 Jan 2008

New clues about BRCA1 role in breast cancer

A breast cancer gene's newly discovered role in repairing damaged DNA may help explain why women who inherit a mutated copy of the gene are at increased risk for developing both breast and ovarian cancer.

17 Jan 2008

MIT reports single gene can encode as many as four different functions

MIT scientists have found a new way that DNA can carry out its work that is about as surprising as discovering that a mold used to cast a metal tool can also serve as a tool itself, with two complementary shapes each showing distinct functional roles.

14 Jan 2008

Insights into cell movement likely to aid immune study, cancer research

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have used yeast cells to better understand a collection of proteins associated with the formation of actin networks, which are essential to cell movement.

9 Jan 2008

Discovery of 480 genes that control human cell division

A team of U.S., Israeli and German scientists used computational biology techniques to discover 480 genes that play a role in human cell division and to identify more than 100 of those genes that have an abnormal pattern of activation in cancer cells.

8 Jan 2008

New understanding of actin networks

Dynamic networks of growing actin filaments are critical for many cellular processes, including cell migration, intracellular transport, and the recovery of proteins from the cell surface.

4 Jan 2008

Discovery of potential oral treatment for diabetes

Research in the Department of Biology at the Faculty of Science and Science Education of the University of Haifa has discovered a substance that may become an oral treatment for diabetes and its complications.

28 Dec 2007

Scientists identifiy elusive telomere RNA subunit in single cell model

The Stowers Institute's Baumann Lab has identified the long-sought telomerase RNA gene in a single-cell research model.

28 Dec 2007

Discovery reveals how fat is stored in cells

In discovering the genes responsible for storing fat in cells, scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have answered one of biology's most fundamental questions.

18 Dec 2007

How molecular muscles help cells divide

Time-lapse videos and computer simulations provide the first concrete molecular explanation of how a cell flexes tiny muscle-like structures to pinch itself into two daughter cells at the end of each cell division, according to a report in Science Express.

17 Dec 2007