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Long-Sought Protein Structure May Help Reveal How 'Gene Switch' Works


ScienceDaily
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:52 UTC
AMP receptor protein
© Travis Gallagher, NISTComputer model of the defined structure for the cyclic AMP receptor protein (CRP) found in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
The bacterium behind one of mankind's deadliest scourges, tuberculosis, is helping researchers at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) move closer to answering the decades-old question of what controls the switching on and off of genes that carry out all of life's functions.

The NIST/BNL team reports that it has defined - for the first time - the structure of a "metabolic switch" found inside most types of bacteria - the cyclic AMP (cAMP) receptor protein, or CRP - in its "off" state. CRP is the "binding site" (attachment point) for cAMP, a small molecule that, once attached, serves as the signal to throw the switch. This "on" state of CRP then turns on the genes that help a microbe survive in a human host.

The researchers hope that once the switching mechanism is understood the data can be used to develop new methods for preventing tuberculosis and other pathogenic bacterial diseases.
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Researchers Find Micro RNA Plays a Key Role in Melanoma Metastasis


PhysOrg
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:41 UTC
Scientists have long wondered how melanoma cells travel from primary tumors on the surface of the skin to the brain, liver and lungs, where they become more aggressive, resistant to therapy, and deadly. Now, scientists from NYU Langone Medical Center have identified the possible culprit - a short strand of RNA called microRNA (miRNA) that is over-expressed in metastatic melanoma cell lines and tissues.

The new findings, published online this week and in the February 10, 2009 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that miRNA silencing to counteract or attack this mechanism may be an effective therapeutic strategy for metastatic melanoma, according to Eva Hernando, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU School of Medicine, and the lead author of the study. Dr. Hernando is also a member of the NYU Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center.

The highly aggressive character of melanoma, says Dr. Hernando, makes it an excellent model to probe the mechanisms underlying metastasis, the process by which cancer cells travel from the primary tumor to distant sites in the body. Though other researchers have found that altered miRNAs contribute to breast cancer metastasis, this is the first study to examine the role of miRNA in metastatic melanoma.
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Family

Science: Nature vs. Nurture

Rob Stein
Washington Post
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:13 UTC
Ever wonder what makes a bigger difference in a baby's life, nature or nurture? Post staff writer Rob Stein and Cardiff University researcher Frances Rice were online Monday, Feb. 9 at 11 a.m. ET to discuss a recently released Cardiff University research project that used "test tube" babies to try to answer the question many ask.

A transcript follows.

____________________
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Health

TSH: Thyroid Stimulating Hooey & The Loss of Wisdom

Janie Bowthorpe
OpEdNews.com
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:44 UTC
If you're old enough to remember Doc Adams in the western TV series Gunsmoke, or have seen any reruns, you'd know that ol' Doc was the kind of crusty codger of a doctor who would look right at your symptoms and get a pretty good idea how he needed to treat you.

And somehow, you'd think that kind of intuitive medical wisdom would have been passed down to modern physicians.....

It has not.

Today's science-and-Big-Pharma-stuffed physicians are as wise and observant as a bag of rocks when it comes to clear symptoms, all thanks to their tunnel vision love affair with ink spots on a piece of paper called a "lab result". And one of the worst laboratory tests ever invented? The TSH, aka Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, or thyrotropin for short.
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Bell

Pesticides in Pet Products: Why Your Dog or Cat May Be at Risk

M.B. Pell and Jillian Olsen
Alternet
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:22 UTC
A growing number of pets are dying from flea and tick treatments because of a dangerous pesticide.

Last June, Diane Bromenschenkel applied a flea-and-tick product to her English pointer, Wings, so the dog wouldn't get ticks while hunting pheasant in the tall grasslands of western Idaho. Wings, a healthy five-year-old with a sleek white coat and a chocolate brown mask, enjoyed long walks in the woods, bacon treats, and burying things in the yard. But three months after the pesticide was applied, the animal was dead.

It was just hours following the use of the product that Bromenschenkel knew something was wrong. She noticed her dog walking around in a daze. Wings was unresponsive. On the advice of her veterinarian, Bromenschenkel tried to wash off the treatment - Bio Spot Spot On Flea and Tick Control for Dogs -- but the next day Wings was still suffering.
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Why it Hurts to be Away from Your Partner

Erica Westly
Scientific American
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:12 UTC
Psychological impacts of long-term separation anxiety.

Why
© iStockphoto/Bojan tezak
Everyone knows it's no fun to be away from your significant other. Studies using anecdotal evidence have indicated that long-term separation from a romantic partner can lead to increased anxiety and depression as well as problems such as sleep disturbances. Now researchers are identifying the neurochemical mechanisms behind these behavioral and physiological effects.

In a study published last fall, researchers showed that male prairie voles that had been separated from their female partners for four days - a much shorter amount of separation time than researchers had previously found to affect the voles' physiology - exhibited depression-like behavior and had increased levels of corticosterone, the rodent equivalent of the human stress hormone cortisol. Males that had been separated from their male siblings did not display any of these symptoms, implying the response was tied specific­ally to mate separation, not just social isolation. When the animals received a drug that blocked cortico­sterone re­lease, they no longer exhibited depres­sion-like behavior following partner sep­aration, confirming that stress hor­mones were at the root of the response.
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Heart

People in Love are Blind to Pretty Faces

Kurt Kleiner
Scientific American
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:07 UTC
A built-in aversion to attractive members of the opposite sex may help cement monogamous relationships.

Blind Love
© Istockphoto/ Alija
If your loved one claims to "only have eyes for you" this Valentine's Day, it might be truer than you think. Research shows that people in a committed relationship who have been thinking about their partner actually avert their eyes from attractive members of the opposite sex without even being aware they are doing it.

Psychologist Jon Maner of Florida State University and his colleagues flashed pictures of faces on a computer screen for half a second, following it immediately with a square or circle, which participants had to identify by pushing the correct button. Earlier research using this method has found that it takes longer for viewers to shift their attention away from attrac­tive faces of the opposite sex.
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Pills

Climate change hysteria takes mental toll

Emily Anthes
Boston Globe
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:44 UTC
Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.
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People

Workplace Psychopaths Leave a Trail of Destruction

Mandy de Waal
ITWeb
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:26 UTC
One out of a hundred people that you work with will be a psychopath.

At the start of my career, one of my first bosses was an out and out psychopath. A narcissistic layabout, this person's career was driven by hiving off the talent of others, taking credit for work that was not hers and bullying her staff to the point of abuse.

She was a pathological liar who was highly manipulative and destructive, and because of that she had a turnstile at the door of her department. People just didn't last long because she made working conditions absolutely intolerable.

I didn't know too much about psychology then, all I knew was that she was disturbed and dangerous. It was only later when I began to study the phenomenon of workplace bullying that I discovered she fitted the profile of a psychopath, perfectly.
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Lunacy and the Full Moon

Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz
Scientific American
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:18 UTC
Does a full moon really trigger strange behavior?

Across the centuries, many a person has uttered the phrase "There must be a full moon out there" in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night. Indeed, the Roman goddess of the moon bore a name that remains familiar to us today: Luna, prefix of the word "lunatic." Greek philosopher Aristotle and Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the "moistest" organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. Belief in the "lunar lunacy effect," or "Transylvania effect," as it is sometimes called, persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were widely reputed to transmogrify into werewolves or vampires during a full moon.

Even today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events. One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.
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