Curated News: National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)

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University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers find advanced AI could lead to easier, faster and more efficient hospital quality reporting.

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Eight-member team from UChicago and Northwestern will launch the Cellular Adaptation Lab to study how fundamental cellular behaviors are linked to disease and responses to climate change.

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While engaging in cell division research, Silke Hauf and members of her lab made a surprisingly quiet discovery. When cells express RNA, there are always some fluctuations, or noise, in how much RNA is produced. Hauf’s group found several genes whose noise dips below a previously established minimum threshold, known as the noise floor, during expression “We have solid data for this phenomenon,” said Hauf, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech.

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Nanozymes—artificial enzymes that can carry out pre-determined chemical reactions—could selectively activate a cancer drug within a tumor while minimizing damage to healthy tissue in a mouse model of triple negative breast cancer.

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Investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have designed an innovative RNA-based strategy to activate dendritic cells—which play a key role in immune response—that eradicated tumors and prevented their recurrence in mouse models of melanoma.

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Scientists have unraveled the step-by-step activation process of a protein with a deep evolutionary history in all domains of life, opening the door to harnessing its functions for use as a biotechnology tool.

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If the human cell is a nightclub, then the nucleus is a VIP lounge fiercely maintained by the nuclear pore complex. By modeling a dynamic simulation of the NPC, Beckman physicists have theorized as to why some proteins enter the nucleus more readily than others.

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Scientists have taken an important step forward in predicting who will develop Type 1 diabetes months before symptoms appear.

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New research has unlocked insights into how “good fat” tissue could potentially be harnessed to combat obesity and remove glucose from the blood, helping to control diabetes. Published today in Science Advances, the work is a collaboration between researchers with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Cambridge, Free University of Brussels and University of East Anglia.

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A new method than enables researchers to dial up or tone down the amount of a certain metastatic protein inhibitor (BACH1) within a cell could provide a new path in cancer research that reassesses the effectiveness of protein inhibitors to treat disease.

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Researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center have discovered a new nutrient source that pancreatic cancer cells use to grow. The molecule, uridine, offers insight into both biochemical processes and possible therapeutic pathways. The findings, published in Nature, show that cancer cells can adapt when they don’t have access to glucose.

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Researchers from Argonne, Michigan State University and Northwestern University used Argonne’s Bionanoprobe beamline to look at the concentration of zinc in egg cells.

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Genome editing is used to modify the genes of living organisms to elicit certain traits, such as climate-resilient crops or treating human disease at the genetic level. It has become increasingly popular in agriculture, medicine and basic science research over the past decade, and will continue to be relevant and utilized well into the future.

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Strategies to treat pain without triggering dangerous side effects such as euphoria and addiction have proven elusive. Now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine have identified a potential pathway to pain relief that neither triggers addiction nor causes hallucinations.

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A study, led by University of Oregon neuroscientist Shawn Lockery, points to worms as a useful tool for understanding more about the many roles that cannabinoids naturally play in the body. And it could help researchers develop better drugs that target this system.

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A researcher from Wayne State University’s Department of Biological Sciences has received a five-year, $1.95 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to identify mechanisms that regulate inositol synthesis in mammalian cells and determine the cellular consequences of inositol depletion.

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New AI tool accurately predicts both overall survival and disease-free survival after colorectal cancer diagnosis. The model uses visual markers on pathology images to glean insights into a tumor’s genomic profile and predicts tumor behavior, disease progression, treatment response. The new model could help augment clinical decision-making. Because the AI tool relies on images alone, it could be particularly valuable for hospitals lacking the technology or expertise to perform sophisticated genomic profiling of tumor tissues.

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Scientists have made progress in understanding the circadian clock, the 24-hour cycle that synchronizes with light-dark exposure, and how it functions. They developed a new way to study how the circadian clock synchronizes in real time, revealing surprises about the clock’s mechanisms.