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Cool Image: Tracing Proteins in Action

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Bright amorphous loops
These bright, amorphous loops represent a never-before-seen glimpse at how proteins that play a key role in cell duplication are themselves duplicated. Credit: Sue Jaspersen, Zulin Yu and Jay Unruh, Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

Looking like necklaces stacked on a dresser, these bright, amorphous loops show the outlines of yeast proteins that make up the spindle pole, a cellular component found in organisms as diverse as yeast and humans. Each cell starts with a single spindle pole, which must somehow duplicate to form the pair that works together to pull matching chromosomes apart during cell division. Scientists don’t completely understand how this duplication occurs, but they do know that errors in spindle pole copying can lead to a number of health conditions, including cancer.

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Sharing ‘Behind the Scene’ Stories About Scientific Discoveries

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth? For cell biologist Ron Vale, it’s priceless.

Screen shot from the video
In this iBiology Exit icon “discovery talk,” Ron Vale describes the twists and turns that led him to unexpected findings, including a motor protein involved in important cellular processes.

In 2006, Vale started a video-based science outreach project called iBiology Exit icon to give people around the world broader access to research seminars. The free online videos, which cover a range of biomedical fields and career-related topics, take viewers behind the scenes of scientific findings and convey the excitement of the discovery process.

While geared mostly for undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, the videos are also a rich resource for anyone who wants a better understanding of many biomedical areas, including those we cover on this blog. Continue reading “Sharing ‘Behind the Scene’ Stories About Scientific Discoveries”

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Interview With a Worm: We’re Not So Different

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Planarian
Credit: Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
Schmidtea mediterranea
Home: Freshwater habitats along the Mediterranean
Party trick: Regenerating its head
Most charismatic feature: Eyespots
Work site: Science labs worldwide

The planarian has a power few creatures can match. Remove its head, its tail or nearly any of its body parts, and this aquatic flatworm will simply grow it back. Humans can’t do that, of course. And yet many of the genes that help the planarian regenerate are also found in us. To learn more about this tiny marvel, we “interviewed” a representative. Continue reading “Interview With a Worm: We’re Not So Different”

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El Niño Season Temperatures Linked to Dengue Epidemics

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Screen shot from a video showing dengue incidence in Southeast Asia.
Incidence of dengue fever across Southeast Asia, 1993-2010. Note increasing incidence (red) starting about June 1997, which corresponds to a period of higher temperatures driven by a strong El Niño season. At the end of the El Niño event, in January 1999, dengue incidence is much lower (green). Credit: Wilbert van Panhuis, University of Pittsburgh.

Weather forecasters are already warning about an intense El Niño season that’s expected to alter precipitation levels and temperatures worldwide. El Niño seasons, characterized by warmer Pacific Ocean water along the equator, may impact the spread of some infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.

In a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers reported a link between intense dengue fever epidemics in Southeast Asia and the high temperatures that a previous El Niño weather event brought to that region.

Dengue fever, a viral infection transmitted by the Aedes mosquito, can cause life-threatening high fever, severe joint pain and bleeding. Infection rates soar every two to five years. Interested in understanding why, an international team of researchers collected and analyzed incidence reports including 3.5 million dengue fever cases across eight Southeast Asian countries spanning an 18-year period. The study is part of Project Tycho, an effort to study disease transmission dynamics by mining historical data and making that data freely available to others. Continue reading “El Niño Season Temperatures Linked to Dengue Epidemics”

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Cool Images: A Halloween-Inspired Cell Collection

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As Halloween approaches, we turned up some spectral images from our gallery. The collection below highlights some spooky-sounding—but really important—biological topics that researchers are actively investigating to spur advances in medicine.

Cell Skeleton
Fibroblast
The cell skeleton, or cytoskeleton, is the framework that gives a cell its shape, helps it move and keeps its contents organized for proper function. A cell that lacks a cytoskeleton becomes misshapen and immobile. This fibroblast, a cell that normally makes connective tissues and travels to the site of a wound to help it heal, is lacking a cytoskeleton. Researchers have associated faulty cytoskeletons and resulting abnormal cell movement with birth defects and weakened immune system functioning. See fibroblasts with healthy skeletons.

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Turning Back Every Clock

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Clock
Scientists are studying which genes control biological clock gears and which genes are controlled by them. Credit: Stock image.

When daylight savings time ends this Sunday, we’ll need to adjust every clock in our homes, cars and offices. Our internal clocks will need to adjust too.

The body has a master clock in the brain, as well as others in nearly every tissue and organ. These biological clocks drive circadian rhythms, the physical, mental and behavioral changes we experience on a roughly 24-hour cycle. Your hunger in the morning and sleepiness at night, for example, are caused partly by clock gears in motion. These gears can get out of synch with the day-night cycle when the time changes or when we travel through time zones.

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Meet Sharon Cobb: Aiming to Understand Pain in Aging African Americans

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Sharon Cobb
Credit: UCLA School of Nursing
Sharon Cobb
Field: Nursing
Raised in: Los Angeles, California
Studied at: University of California, Berkeley; Charles R. Drew University; and University of California, Los Angeles
Musical skill: She can play the triangle if someone asks
If she wasn’t a scientist, she would be: An event planner for celebrity weddings

A single, life-defining moment is what often influences our choice of career paths. But for Sharon Cobb, three significant events empowered her to want to produce a change in society for those affected by health disparities.

First, in high school, she was offered the chance to shadow an OB/GYN nurse practitioner at King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. There, Cobb saw firsthand the need for health care among some of the city’s most vulnerable residents and the challenges involved in delivering that care. This experience led her to pursue a career in nursing. Continue reading “Meet Sharon Cobb: Aiming to Understand Pain in Aging African Americans”

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Help Spread the Word About Cell Day

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Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on our Feedback Loop blog. We’re sharing it here because we think you or others you know may be interested in participating in this science education event.

Cell Day 2015On November 5, we’ll host my favorite NIGMS science education event: Cell Day! As in previous years, we hope this free, interactive Web chat geared for middle and high school students will spark interest in cell biology, biochemistry and research careers. Please help us spread the word by letting people in your local schools and communities know about this special event and encouraging them to register. It runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. EST and is open to all.

As the moderator of these Cell Day chats, I’ve fielded a lot of great questions, including “Why are centrioles not found in plant cells?” and “If you cut a cell in half and then turn it upside down will the nucleus, ribosomes, and other parts of the cell fall out?” It’s always amazing to hear what science students are thinking or wondering about. I’m looking forward to seeing what fantastic questions we’ll get this year!

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Cool Image: DNA Origami

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Computer-generated sketch of a DNA origami folded into a flower-and-bird structure.
A computer-generated sketch of a DNA origami folded into a flower-and-bird structure. Credit: Hao Yan, Arizona State University.

This image of flowers visited by a bird is made of DNA, the molecule that provides the genetic instructions for making living organisms. It shows the latest capability of a technique called DNA origami to precisely twist and fold DNA into complex arrangements, which might find future use in biomedical applications.

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Bacterial ‘Fight Clubs’ and the Search for New Medicines

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Competition encourages bacteria to produce secondary metabolites with therapeutic potential that they would otherwise hold in reserve. Credit: Michael Smeltzer, Vanderbilt University.

Bacteria hold a vast reservoir of compounds with therapeutic potential. They use these compounds, known as secondary metabolites, to protect themselves against their enemies. We use them in many antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and other treatments.

Scientists interested in developing new medicines have no shortage of places to look for secondary metabolites. There are an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 bacterial species on Earth. Each species is capable of producing hundreds of secondary metabolites, but often only under specific ecological conditions. The challenge for researchers is figuring out how to coax the bacteria to produce these compounds.

Now, Brian Bachmann and John McLean of Vanderbilt University and their teams have shown that by creating “fight clubs” where bacteria compete with one another, they can trigger the bacteria to make a wide diversity of molecules, including secondary metabolites. Continue reading “Bacterial ‘Fight Clubs’ and the Search for New Medicines”