The world's largest society of cell biology researchers released a statement today opposing a proposed United Nations ban on cloning research as overbroad and likely to damage biomedical progress against human disease.
"Cell Biology 2003," the essential press guide for the American Society for Cell Biology's Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2003, in San Francisco, is now available at no charge to science journalists.
At the Annual Meeting: Cell biologists at UC Davis show for the first time that mesenchymal stem cells can be dehydrated for storage and activated for possible use in future stem cell therapies.
At the Meeting"”A simple worm with exactly 302 neurons may serve as a laboratory model for epileptic seizures in the vastly more complex human brain, say University of Alabama cell biologists.
At the meeting"” A new discovery about neuronal transport in mice may clarify a rare but devastating progressive neuromuscular disease in humans, according to University of Pennsylvania cell biologists.
At the ASCB meeting"”The human genome is kept safe inside the cell nucleus behind gates called nuclear pore complexes. UC San Diego researchers have now identified the "linchpins" that hold these critical gates together.
At the meeting: The fast and furious "sonic" muscle of the male midshipman fish gives NIAMS researchers a possible clue to a human muscle-weakening genetic disease.
At the meeting: Harvard biologist shows video of a never-before-witnessed sight"”the transport and fusion of a single influenza virus inside a living cell.
At the meeting: Canadian researchers trace the intra-cellular pathway of HIV-1 through trophoblasts, the special cells of the placenta, and a little understood route for mother-to-child HIV infection.
At the meeting: European "Bionic Ear" researchers report isolation of stem cells from vestibular sensory epithelia (VSE) that can be manipulated into becoming new sensory hair-cells.
Researchers trace human sex reversal"”genetic XY males born with female reproductive organs or genitalia"”to a misshapen protein that cannot enter the cell nucleus.
Cells exposed briefly to soluble metal ions, specifically chromium or vanadium, can become chromosomally damaged, resulting in long-term genomic instability.
Weeks after the initial injury, the formation of fibrotic or scar tissue in muscle can prevent total recovery, say researchers, but the key to healing without scarring may be in controlling an overlooked transforming growth factor.
ASCB names"Hot Picks," top research papers in Late Abstracts presentions at Annual Meeting. Papers cover range of topics from the origins of Gullah-speaking African-Americans to a powerful cellular self-defense mechanism against breast cancer.
Harvey Lodish, president of the American Society for Cell Biology and an Ohio native son, calls on Governor Taft and the Ohio Board of Education to reject the latest attempt by Creationists to undermine Ohio science education.
The ASCB is protesting the Bush administration's "Friday Afternoon Massacre," the removal of Elizabeth Blackburn, renowned biologist and former ASCB president from the President's Bioethics panel, saying the firing significantly undermines the Council scientific credibility.
Two scientists whose research discoveries changed the ground rules in their respective fields were named winners today of the 2004 "Women In Cell Biology Senior and Junior Career Awards" by the American Society for Cell Biology.
Yale's Tom Pollard,the cell biologist whose research group discovered the long-sought mechanism by which eukaryotic cells move and change shape, is the 2004 winner of the E.B. Wilson Medal, the highest scientific honor of the American Society for Cell Biology.
The American Society for Cell Biology has opened its "Free Online "˜Working Press' Registration" at www.ascb.org for science journalists interested in covering its 44th Annual Meeting.
The American Society for Cell Biology, with 11,000 scientist members working in basic biomedical research in the US and 50 countries around the world, opposes any United Nations action to prohibit stem cell research with the potential to understand and treat disease.
A "pdf" version of "Cell Biology 2004," the press book for the ASCB Annual Meeting, Dec. 4-8, is now accessible to registered science journalists. Registration is free, carries no obligation to attend, and is thus one heck of a deal.
Johns Hopkins researcher John Gearhart has taken another small step on the road toward replenishing damaged cardiac tissue with pre-cursor cardiac cells grown from human embryonic stem cells (ES cells) in a highly reproducible system through controlled ES cell differentiation.
Using time-lapse confocal laser-scanning microscopy,NIH researchers have captured on video human T-cells zeroing in for the kill on viruses, revealing for the first time that "killer" T-cells take far longer to dispatch their viral enemies than was generally believed.
At the ASCB Meeting: Videos made by Swiss researchers employing advanced light microscopy techniques show viruses forcing their way into living cells through two previously unsuspected pathways that bypass known endosomal routes.
Severed axons do not regenerate after CNS injury because regrowth is blocked in part by glial scars. Sally Meiners of the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School designs grafts or scaffolds to bridge that barrier with small molecules from the extracellular matrix.
Parkinson's is caused by the selective death of dopamine-producing neurons. By using an agricultural pesticide known to produce "Parkinson-like" symptoms, a researcher has found connections between pesticide damage and mutated parkin.
The cell nucleus is a dynamic organelle -- "Mothership of the Human Genome" as one researcher calls it -- acting on chromatin, genes, and DNA while resisting disease. Now a study of the nuclear envelope's physical properties by molecular bioengineers and cell biologists reveals a new role"”-molecular shock absorber.
Searching for eco-friendly, "natural" biological control strategies, scientists at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi have identified the potent killer protein created by an insecticidal bacterium that lives symbiotically with an "entomopathogenic" nematode.
Low-level radio frequency radiation from mobile phones appears to produce biological effects on a cytoskeletal protein in human endothelial cells grown in culture, according to data released by the head of the Finnish national radiation safety laboratory.
Autophagy means "self-eating." Cells use it to survive starvation and to recycle proteins but work by Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Genetics show autophagy in a new role as the cell's innate 'second line of defense' against invading pathogens such as strep. bacteria.
Knowing what's hot and what's not is vital for living things. The ability to know when it's too hot and move away is called "thermotaxis." Now for the first time in animals, MIT biologists have identified a temperature-sensing protein that mediates thermotaxis.
A gallery of highly-specific, gene and protein "mug shots" of cancer types would be a powerful "ID kit" for oncologists. The first systematic demonstration by NIH scientists that normal skin pigment-forming melanocytes and cancerous melanoma cells express different isoforms of an important transporter protein is another clue for a skin cancer "rogues' gallery."
Clinical studies have shown that cigarette smoke"”whether "first-" or "second-hand""”slows wound healing and increases the risk of scarring. In a closer look at fibroblast cell migration in wound healing, researchers found that cigarette smoke delays the formation of healing tissue.
A new study provides yet more compelling evidence that defective cilia are the predominant cause of polycystic kidney disease. Defective cilia may cause kidney epithelial cell overgrowth by failing to serve as biomechanical sensors.
During its life cycle, Y. pestis, the infamous "Black Death" bacteria must survive the "bio" environment of a flea in order to explode in the vastly different human system. A team turned advanced robotic high-throughput technologies on Y. pestis, looking for weaknesses in this highly adaptable killer.
Noboru Mizushima of Japan's National Institute of Genetics has disturbing news"”babies are born starving. This is no metaphor. Neonates are so hungry that they start eating themselves or, at least, newborn lab mice "˜eat' their own cells in the first three to 12 hours after birth to tide them over.
Asthma's mechanical impact on the cells lining constricted airways and how a color ink jet printer can be used to study muscle fiber formation are the two top "Hot Picks" chosen from more than 380 late-breaking abstracts.
Acting on behalf of the White House, the National Science Foundation today awarded the ASCB the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for its efforts to change the face of science by bringing minorities, women and other under-represented groups into research biology.
The nation's largest society of research cell biologists, the ASCB, welcomes the support of Republican Senator Bill Frist for expanding federal support of embryonic stem cell research.
The Kaluza Prizes to honor the best in graduate student bioscience research are growing. In announcing the opening of the 2014 Kaluza Prize competition, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), in collaboration with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, said that the awards will increase to $5,000, $3,000, and $1,000 in ranked order for the top three winners.
If cells were cars, the three pioneering cell biologists just named winners of the 2014 E.B. Wilson Medal, the ASCB’s highest scientific honor, helped write the essential parts list. Bill Brinkley of Baylor, John Heuser of Washington University, St. Louis, and Peter Satir of Albert Einstein College of Medicine identified crucial pieces of the cytoskeleton, the cell’s shape-shifting framework, and showed how these elements drive life at the cellular level.
Travelers at DC’s Dulles airport will find themselves in an exotic microscopic world as “Life: Magnified,” an exhibit of 46 eye-popping color images of life on the cellular level, opens in Concourse C. “Life: Magnified” is a project of ASCB and NIH, and the Airports Authority with support from ZEISS.
“JIF Day” is late this year and the DORA “anti-JIF” coalition of scientists and journal editors is greeting the delayed arrival this week of the 2014 Journal Impact Factor (JIFs) from Thomson Reuters with examples of JIF-less “good practices” for scientific assessment and a new web page.
In work to be presented at the ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia, researchers from the Institut Curie in Paris report that they have evidence of a coordinated attack on the basement membrane of human colon cells by cancer cells in situ and CAF cells in the extracellular matrix that begins long before the actual translocation of cancer cells.
Now bioengineering researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia have come up with an experimental workaround—a synthetic pediatric blood-brain barrier on a small chip—and have tested it successfully using rat brain endothelial cells (RBECs) from rat pups and human endothelial cells.
The search for a living laboratory model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—the so-called “Alzheimer’s in a dish”—has a new candidate. Håkan Toresson and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden report success in creating induced neurons that model Alzheimer’s by starting with fibroblasts taken from skin biopsies.
Jae-Won Shin and David Mooney of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Cambridge, MA, describe building a three-dimensional (3D) hydrogel system with tunable stiffness to see how relative stiffness of the surrounding ECM affected the resistance of human myeloid leukemias to chemotherapeutic drugs.
The even more surprising answer was that rescuing the Golgi reduced Aβ accumulation significantly, apparently by re-opening a normal protein degradation pathway for the amyloid precursor protein (APP).
The average animal cell is 10 microns across but why? Princeton bioengineers take their story of gravity in cells one step further at ASCB, describing how cells manage to support thousands of membrane-less compartments inside the nucleus