Tag: human

The placenta is the organ connecting mother and embryo. Its main functions are the exchange of nutrients, gases and metabolic products and the production of hormones and other substances essential for embryonic development. Placental malfunctions are the main cause of pregnancy complications and can lead to miscarriage and other serious disorders that endanger both mother

Individuals with defects in copper metabolism may soon have more targeted treatment options thanks to a discovery by a research team led by Dr. Vishal Gohil of Texas A&M AgriLife Research in College Station. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that an investigational anticancer-drug, elesclomol, can restore the production

A large team of researchers from the U.S. and China has succeeded in identifying a number of RNA fragments found in human fat tissue. In their paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine the group describes their study of the fragments they found and their possible links with obesity. Prior research has reported RNA

The newest antiviral drugs could take advantage of a compound made not by humans, but inside them. A team of researchers has identified the mode of action of viperin, a naturally occurring enzyme in humans and other mammals that is known to have antiviral effects on a wide variety of viruses, including West Nile, hepatitis

A breakthrough in brain research has promising implications for health and may lead to new answers about depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Parkinson’s disease. In a recent study, University of Victoria cognitive neuroscientist Clay Holroyd—with post-doctoral fellow José Ribas-Fernandes and Ph.D. student Danesh Shahnazian from UVic, and colleagues Tom Verguts and Massimo Silvetti from

Researchers have developed an artificial tissue in which human blood stem cells remain functional for a prolonged period of time. Scientists from the University of Basel, University Hospital Basel, and ETH Zurich have reported their findings in the scientific journal PNAS. In the bone marrow, several billion blood cells are formed each day. This constant

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The dramatic transformation does not require the cells to first enter a state called pluripotency but instead occurs through

Some human brains are nearly twice the size of others—but how might that matter? Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and their NIH grant-funded colleagues have discovered that these differences in size are related to the brain’s shape and the way it is organized. The bigger the brain, the more its additional

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have been studying how the immune system succeeds in keeping pathogens in check. For the first time, the researchers have now discovered antibodies that are capable of disarming not only one specific bacterium, but a whole variety of microorganisms at once. The newly discovered antibodies recognize a

University of Minnesota researchers in the dentistry school-based Institute for Molecular Virology (IMV) have made a key discovery that could have important implications for developing a strategy to stop the spread of a highly infectious virus currently spreading among remote areas of central Australia. Called human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1), infection rates are

A new drug could ease the distress of men and women who suffer from baldness, according to researchers from The University of Manchester’s Centre for Dermatology Research. The study from the laboratory of Prof Ralf Paus, is published today (8 May) in the open access journal PLOS Biology It shows that a drug originally designed

A team from the University of Oxford and Cardiff University have used mathematical models to re-enact the complex process of brain development that occurs as initialising cells, otherwise known as progenitor cells, start to grow and begin to differentiate into more specialist cells at various points in time. By applying this experimentally realistic model to

What if human brain tissue implanted into a pig transferred some of the donor’s self-awareness and memories? Such a scenario, out of reach for now, is becoming more and more conceivable, according to a group of scientists, ethicists, and philosophers who called Wednesday for a debate on the ethics of storing and using human brain

New research, published in Biological Reviews and conducted by researchers from the University of Liverpool and Escola Superior de Ciências da Saúde (Brasília, Brazil) has found some type of cancers unique to humans may be a result of evolutionary accidents. Cancer is a major cause of death worldwide. But humans are not the only species