RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-24 Research News Early in the course of Alzheimer disease, blockages in axonal traffic lead to sick axons swollen with the jumbled pile-up of traffic components. The blockages precede overt amyloid pathology in AD mouse models by a year and mark the brains o
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-21 Research News Having just brought you some news on the nurture half of the developmental equation (see ARF related news story), we flip the coin and examine a new study demonstrating the power of genetics in mental health. An article published in the Febr
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-18 Research News Scientists still have a long way to go before they can harness the immense potential of human stem cells. This week in Nature journals, three separate reports lay out some of the current problems and offer some new methodologies that might m
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-15 Research News When molecular biologists go “fishing,” they don’t really expect to catch any fish. Not unless you’re talking about the protein FISH, named after its five SH3 domains. In the February 22 PNAS, Irene Griswold-Prenner and colleagues from Elan
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-14 Research News Scientists have little trouble accepting the idea that ontogeny is a process rich in interplay between genetic and environmental factors, or that environmental insults ranging from malnutrition to toxins during the embryonic and early postna
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-10 Research News Researchers in Junying Yuan’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School report that they have identified a small molecule that interferes with a protein phosphatase in such a way that it enables cultured cells to withstand endoplasmic reticulum s
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-10 Research News Whenever a genetic cause is found for a disease, an animal model is in the cards, and Parkinson disease (PD) is no exception. Since recessive mutations in the DJ-1 gene were shown to cause familial PD (see ARF related news story), researcher
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-10 Research News Just how good are animal models of neurodegenerative disorders? After all, those based on genetic lesions recapitulate only aspects of human disease; this is true of both Alzheimer’s (see related information on animal models) and Parkinson’s
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-07 Research News Garbage in–garbage out is a common mantra among computer programmers. In biology, it could easily apply to the proteasome, which pulls in waste proteins, chews them up, and gets them out of circulation. So if instead the garbage is piling up
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-04 Research News By amplifying small quantities of Aβ oligomer in cerebrospinal fluid, a methodology referred to as the "bio-barcode" could serve as a diagnostic or monitoring test for Alzheimer disease, according to a study published this week in
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-01-31 Research News Combining their individual fortés, the laboratories of Dave Holtzman at Washington University, St. Louis, and Brian Bacskai and Brad Hyman at Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, treat us to the sight of neurons being treated before
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-01-31 Research News Par-4, the leucine-zipper protein first found in apoptotic prostate cancer cells, can regulate β-secretase (BACE) cleavage of amyloid-β precursor protein (AβPP), according to a paper in press in the January 25 Journal of Biological Chemistry
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-01-29 Conference Coverage Summary by Peter Davies, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The first thing to note is that we really underestimated the popularity of the topic. We invited only about 100 people, but by the end of the day, there were more than twice
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-01-26 Research News Last Friday, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson announced that health authorities were reviewing safety data on galantamine hydrobromide (trade name Reminyl®), a drug that has been approved to treat symptoms of Alzheimer diseas