Myocardial infarction results in irreversible damage to the heart that can cause congestive heart failure. The lasting damage results from the limited ability of the myocardium to regenerate and self-repair. Douglas Losordo and colleagues from Tufts University now document the existence of a previously unrecognized subset of human bone marrow–derived stem cells with therapeutic potency for myocardial tissue regeneration following myocardial infarction.

A signaling protein called IRE1, which helps stressed-out cells make new proteins, may be more versatile and important than scientists believed. A new study by researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reveals the surprising finding that this same signaling protein is required for the formation of immune cells called B lymphocytes.

"This is a unique signaling pathway," says Randal Kaufman, Ph.D., a professor of biological chemistry in the U-M Medical School and an HHMI investigator. "In most pathways, there are multiple components and crosstalk. But there's only one IRE1 gene and one protein that carries out a unique biochemical reaction. This makes IRE1 a perfect target for pharmacological intervention for B cell-driven autoimmune diseases, like myasthenia gravis or systemic lupus erythematosus."

Results from the study will be published in the Feb. 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

A University of Michigan research team has found that introducing a growth factor protein into a mouth wound using gene therapy helped generate bone around dental implants, according to a new paper in the February issue of the journal Molecular Therapy.

In a patient with a sizeable mouth wound, replacing a tooth takes more than simply implanting a new one---the patient also needs the bone structure to anchor the new tooth in place. Such reconstructive surgery today involves either taking a bone graft from the patient's chin or jaw, which leaves a second wound needing to heal, or using donated bone from a tissue bank, which yields unpredictable results.

William Giannobile, professor of periodontics, prevention and geriatrics, led a team at the U-M School of Dentistry that delivered the gene encoding for bone morphogenetic protein-7 (BMP-7) to large bone defects in rats in an attempt to turn on the body's own bone growth mechanisms. The study showed that animals that got the BMP-7 treatment produced nearly 50 percent more supporting bone around dental implants than those receiving the conventional treatment.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval to Mylan Technologies, Inc., for the first generic version of Alza Corporation's Duragesic Patch (Fentanyl Transdermal System) used to treat patients suffering from severe chronic pain that cannot be managed with alternative analgesics. When applied to the skin, this patch technology delivers fentanyl, an opioid pain medication that is slowly absorbed into the body through the skin providing pain relief for up to three days (72 hours).

Duke University neurobiologist Erich Jarvis and a team of 28 other neuroscientists have proposed sweeping changes to the terminology associated with the brain structures of birds--a century-old nomenclature the researchers consider outdated and irrelevant to birds' true brainpower.

The international research group concludes in a Feb. 2005, paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that significant discoveries made over time reveal that birds are much closer to mammals in cognitive ability, and therefore, a new consistency in language will enhance studies of both.

In the journal's "Perspectives" column, authors describe a wide range of studies demonstrating that the so-called "primitive" regions of avian brains are actually sophisticated processing regions homologous to those in mammals. Those studies, which included tracing of neural pathways and behavior, showed that such avian brain regions carry out sensory processing, motor control and sensorimotor learning just as the mammalian neocortex. The scientists add that molecular studies reveal the avian and mammalian brain regions are comparable in their genetic and biochemical machinery.

Analyzing microarray data - or even a simple biological network - can get you lost - quick. Tons of genes, tons of synonyms for each, tons of known interactions, with even more being unknown, tons of database with tons of information... and your job is to make sense of this puzzle in a biologically meaningfull way. Applications are being developped to make it all easier, leaving the fun part : biology! GeneNotes is one of them; I didn't have time to try it yet, but it seems like it could help. Nothing revolutionnary judging from the tutorial videos, but still, its a step in the right direction. I encourage you to try it and share your experience in the forum (if you don't want to register) or in the comments section.

Collecting and managing information is a challenging task in a genome-wide profiling research project. Most databases and online computational tools require a direct human involvement. Information and computational results are presented in various multimedia formats (e.g., text, image, PDF, word files, etc.), many of which cannot be automatically processed by computers in biologically meaningful ways. In addition, the quality of computational results is far from perfect and requires nontrivial manual examination. The timely selection, integration and interpretation of heterogeneous biological information still heavily rely on the sensibility of biologists. Biologists often feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of and the great diversity of distributed heterogeneous biological information.

Using genetically altered zebrafish that glow in the dark, University of Houston researchers have found new tools that shed light upon biological clock cycles.

Gregory M. Cahill, associate professor of biology and biochemistry at UH, and Maki Kaneko, a fellow UH researcher who is now at the University of California-San Diego, presented their findings in a paper titled "Light-dependent Development of Circadian Gene Expression in Transgenic Zebrafish," appearing Feb. 1 in the Public Library of Science's PLoS Biology, an online journal that, along with PLoS Medical, is committed to making scientific and medical literature a public resource.

Researchers at New York University and the medical schools at Harvard and Yale universities have identified new genes necessary for embryonic development, according to findings published in the latest issue of Genome Research. This discovery is an important step toward a complete mapping of which parts of the genome are required for embryonic development. The new findings also probe into how genetic networks are built and how they could evolve.

Scientists have made a significant advance toward understanding the regulation of blood stem cells and the complex, lifelong process of blood cell formation. A research study published in the February issue of Developmental Cell expands on previous studies by using adult animals to examine the role of a key gene known to be required for blood cell formation. Information gained from this research will be useful for future studies aimed at directing stem cell differentiation in a variety of potential therapeutic contexts.

The first evidence that a group of proteins called phosphatases play a key role in the development of the nervous system, has been shown in fruit flies and mice by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, in collaboration with scientists at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California. The phosphatases are required for maintenance of neural stem cells and for silencing expression of neuronal genes in non-nervous system tissues.

Sorry for everyone still using Internet Explorer; a little error of date handling in one of my php scripts coupled with the month change caused overflow in some variables, causing the right column to go wild in IE. Its all fixed now; everything display properly in both IE and Firefox (which I highly recommend). So enjoy your Biology news :)

As a side note, I added http compression to the mainpage, it should load even faster now (about 6 seconds on a 56k!). 66% reduction in size is significant by any standard :)