UC Davis researchers have found a new pathway for repairing DNA damaged by oxygen radicals. The results are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A tiny, translucent juvenile zebrafish, on the hunt for even littler prey, has offered up a big insight into how a specific circuit of nerve cells functions in the brain. The technique used to illuminate this circuitry, and the fish model itself, provide one of the first insights into the way individual sets of neurons control a specific behavior.

Hormones, growth factors and several proteins ensure that development occurs in the right way, at the right time. The components that cause breast development in mammals, for example, were thought to be largely known. However, as a team of scientists from Göttingen, Frankfurt and Hanover have now discovered, in the case of breast development, hormones and proteins do not account for the full story. The scientists have shown that tiny ribonucleic acid molecules play a key role in this process. The mammary glands of mice lacking the gene for the microRNAs 212 and 132 failed to grow at puberty. (Nature Genetics, Nov. 7, 2010)