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Omega-3 fats have little or no effect on risk of Type 2 diabetes according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Increased consumption of omega 3 fats is widely promoted globally because of a common belief that it will protect against, or even reverse, conditions such as diabetes. […]

Tree-like branching structures are everywhere in the human body, from the bronchial system in the lungs to the spidering capillaries that supply blood to the extremities. Researchers have long worked to understand the cellular signaling needed to build these intricate structures, but new research suggests that simple physics may play […]

Environmental conditions influence our body mass index (BMI) by increasing or decreasing the effect of inherited genetic variations, University of Queenslandresearchers have discovered. A team led by Huanwei Wang and Professor Jian Yang from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience found the opposite for human height – that the genetic effects that influence it are very stable […]

Research into the self-destruction of cells in humans and plants could lead to treatments for neurodegenerative brain diseases and the development of disease-resistant plants. A study co-led by The University of Queensland’s Professor Bostjan Kobe identified the role certain proteins play in cellular suicide. “To sustain life, diverse organisms like humans and […]

Every day, people are exposed to myriad chemicals both natural and synthetic, some of which may affect human physical development. Testing them has proven challenging, but researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute have come up with a way. Using Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a soil roundworm, the researchers have shown that […]

A gene that can become mutated and cause a rare balance disorder also regulates the behavior of an enzyme that increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital published in Cell. This discovery may help to identify new […]

Even when taking in fewer calories and nutrients, humans and other mammals usually remain protected against infectious diseases they have already encountered.  This may be because memory T cells, which are located throughout the body and required to maintain immune responses to infectious agents, according to scientists at the National […]

Immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of cancer in the last decade, yet many tumors do not respond to these new therapies. A new genome-wide screen of 20,000 human genes in T cells have turned up several new candidates to unleash the immune system’s ability to attack a variety of tumor […]

Scientists from the University of California, Irvine School of Biological Sciences have discovered how to forestall Alzheimer’s disease in a laboratory setting, a finding that could one day help in devising targeted drugs that prevent it. The researchers found that by removing brain immune cells known as microglia from rodent […]

It was long believed the FMR1 premutation — an excessive number of trinucleotide repeats in the FMR1 gene — had no direct effect on the people who carry it. Until recently, the only recognized effect on the carriers of the flawed gene was the risk of having offspring with fragile […]

We are shaped by our environment and our genes. If your parents are tall, you are likely to grow tall yourself. On the other hand, if you eat a lot of junk food, you are also likely to grow fat. But how do the genetic and environmental factors interact? How […]

The interior of a human cell consists, in part, of a complex soup of millions of molecules. One way these biological compounds stay organized is through membrane-less organelles (MLOs) — wall-less liquid droplets made from proteins and RNA that clump together and stay separate from the rest of the cellular stew. […]