It is well known for years that an environment rich in sensory stimuli, and social motiri produces a significant increase in the number of synapses cerebrali.Tuttavia, the causal relationship between the formation of synapses and memory enhancement has never been demonstrated so far. Now A new study published in the journal Neuron introduces a model for studying the role of replacement of synapses in learning and memory in adult animals, and clarifies the mechanisms that link the loss of existing synapses and formation of new ones to improve the memory.

Click to continue »

The loss of biodiversity of plants may irreparably compromise the resources that ecosystems provide to humanity: this is the conclusion of a study coordinated by Emmett Duffy, a researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, now published in the journal American Journal of Botany .

All the plant species helps to purify its water, generates oxygen and provides food and raw materials for many activities, from wood construction paper.

In the latter study were analyzed the results of 574 laboratory and field studies conducted in the five continents over the past two decades, which have measured changes in productivity resulting from the loss of plant species.

Click to continue »

The organization of receptors on the cell surface, critical to the signaling system between them, is regulated by the cytoskeleton. An important step in understanding this complex relationship has been taken from a study conducted at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and presented (“Cytoskeletal control ofreceptor diffusion in membranes Promotes CD36 signaling and function”) to Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society being held in Baltimore.

The researchers, led by Khuloud Jaqaman have used the CD36 protein present in macrophages as a model for the study of the process that governs the aggregation and organization of surface receptors.

Click to continue »

Much research is conducted in this direction in laboratories around the world and if we talked about dream is a dream all but unattainable: a real prospect of achievement exist. The results coming out of the Instituto de Ciencias de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM) and the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB), also in the Spanish capital and both the CSIC, are an example. Indeed, Domingo Barber and his fellow biologists and physicists – an illustration of the necessary and most vaunted interdisciplinarity – published in the journal Biomaterials, a paper reporting the results significant in vivo treatment of tumors by an active guided to the tumor.

Click to continue »

According to the Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health of the city of Tokyo which has launched an awareness campaign, the number of cases of food poisoning in the city increased from two cases in 1999 to six in 2010, four of which involved the consumption of sushi. This year, there were already in January, two cases of severe poisoning.

Click to continue »

Drama in the pond. The insect larva approaches a trivial leaf when suddenly, after touching a hair of that body, it is sucked and ends up locked in a bag (the foil was inflated), where, already, enzymes digestive are in action. The capture took less than a millisecond. The plant in question is the bladderwort (Utricularia vulgaris)A carnivorous plant common in the marshes. Philippe Marmottant, University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, and colleagues have revealed the mechanism of this trap by storm.

First, they recorded using a fast camera movements involved in the sudden vacuum. The images reveal a process of buckling of the door that closes tightly, at rest, the input of the addition: when the sensory hair trigger capture, valve, curved outward, and reverse its curvature, thereby opens (water and prey are sucked) in an instant. Previously, small glands were removed in about an hour, the water inside the trap to the outside, creating a depression which leads to a flattening of the sheet and the storage of elastic energy in walls. Opening the door releases this energy, resulting in the formation of a suction vortex (the acceleration is about 600 g and water enters with a speed of about 1.5 meter per second)

Click to continue »

The transfer of genetic material from the bacterial genome that has been documented for the first time by researchers at Northwestern Medicine. The bacterium in question is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Which causes gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that is one of the oldest of which information is received and one of the few that affects only humans.

The discovery allows for new information on how it has managed to adapt and survive in the host during human evolution.

‘The result has an evolutionary significance: it shows how it could make a large evolutionary steps when you are able to acquire these stretches of DNA “, said Hank Seifert, senior author and professor of microbiology and immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine .

Click to continue »

A molecular switch that activates and deactivates genes in response to the energy needs of the cell has been identified by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute, which report in an article published online in the journal preview Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. The study showed that “riboswitch” RNA have recently discovered a more complex role than thought.

Only in the last two decades have found that some types of RNA are able to perform complex functions such as regulation of gene expression and trigger chemical reactions, and among these are precisely the riboswitch.

Discovered eight years ago, the riboswitch are short strands of RNA that interact with the mRNA of proteins involved in energy metabolism of the cell that act by binding to metabolites. Depending on the amount of bonds set, turn on or off to produce the corresponding protein. Until now it was believed that each of these modulators of gene expression was sufficient to bind specifically to a single metabolite, in response to its higher or lower concentration.

Click to continue »

A new system of gene regulation, exclusive of primates, was discovered by researchers at the University of Rochester who discusses an article published in Nature.

The new mechanism identified involves the Alu elements, repetitive elements that are common in the primate genome during evolution, whose existence has been known for many years but whose function had not yet been clarified.

“Previously no one knew what they were doing Alu elements and long non-coding RNA, did not even know if they were ‘rubbish’ or had some function. Now we have shown that they have an important role in the regulation of proteins,” said Lynne E. Maquat, who led the research in collaboration with Chenguang Gong.

Click to continue »

Many bacteria produce toxins that attack and damage or destroy cells that harbor them. To avoid this weapon strikes even those who produced it, they exploit different strategies, often simultaneously producing protective antitoxin.

Now a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis was able to determine the structure of the toxin and dell’antitossina in S treptococcus pyogenes , a bacterium that is widespread cause a variety of ailments, from joint pain throat with rheumatic fever.

The discovery opens the door to the possibility of designing a new class of antibiotics that exploit the toxin to destroy the bacteria itself.

Click to continue »