For the past five years, Dr. Erika Dyck has been unearthing some intriguing facts related to a group of pioneering psychiatrists who worked in Saskatchewan, Canada in the '50s and '60s.

Imagine you had to break a secret code, but you could see only part of the message. That's the kind of frustration researchers face when trying to identify proteins and characterize how those proteins are modified in cells by biological processes.

Brain formation involves the carefully timed production of different types of nerve cells by neural stem cells: neurons are produced first, then astrocytes. Making too much of one kind of cell and too little of another at a given time could lead to brain malformations. In the October 6 issue of Cell, researchers in the Neurobiology Program at Children's Hospital Boston report discovering a new molecular pathway that influences the timing of nerve-cell production.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have discovered a gene mutation in fruit flies that alters sensitivity to alcohol. The findings, reported in the October 6 issue of the journal Cell, may have implications for human studies seeking to understand innate differences in people's tolerance for alcohol. The research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

By turning on a single gene, researchers can prevent skin stem cells from maturing into the three types of adult skin cells -- epidermal, sebaceous and hair cells. They say this finding could have important implications for scientists trying to grow stem cells in the lab, for both research and potential therapies.

A molecule that cells normally use to fight viruses is also involved in keeping cancer cells alive, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered.