Two studies in today's Nature Neuroscience, led by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), and Harvard Medical School (HMS), implicate mosaic mutations arising during embryonic development ...
Jan 11, 2021
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48
While rare, botulism can cause paralysis and is potentially fatal. It is caused by nerve-damaging toxins produced by Clostridium botulinum—the most potent toxins known. These toxins are often found in contaminated food ...
Jan 8, 2021
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47
Genetics has made huge strides over the past 20 years, from the sequencing of the human genome to a growing understanding of factors that turn genes on and off, namely transcription factors and the DNA "enhancer" sequences ...
Dec 22, 2020
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Loss of myelin—the fatty substance that surrounds the axons of nerve cells—is one of the reasons nerve cells fail to recover after injury and in some diseases. Myelin acts like insulation, covering the long axon threads ...
Nov 6, 2020
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332
Floating in fluid deep in the brain are small, little understood fronds of tissue. Two new studies reveal that these miniature organs are a hotbed of immune system activity. This activity may protect the developing brain ...
Oct 9, 2020
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Sitagliptin, a drug to lower blood sugar in type 2 diabetes, also improves survival in diabetic patients hospitalized with COVID-19, suggests a multicenter observational study in Italy. Patients given sitagliptin in addition ...
Sep 29, 2020
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285
End-stage kidney disease often begins with injury to podocytes. These highly specialized cells are a critical part of the glomeruli, clusters of capillaries that serve as the filtration units in our kidneys' tightly-packed ...
Sep 7, 2020
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85
The rod-like spike proteins on the surface of SARS CoV-2 are the tip of the spear of the COVID-19 pandemic. The spikes bind to human cells via the ACE2 receptor and then dramatically change shape, jack-knifing to fuse the ...
Jul 21, 2020
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177
Interferons and other cytokines produced by the immune system are important defenses against viral infections, but as we have seen in COVID-19, they can also contribute to damaging, potentially life-threatening lung inflammation. ...
Jun 12, 2020
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87
For more than 40 years, scientists and commercial companies have been recreating human skin in laboratories around the world. Yet all of these products lack important aspects of normal skin—hair, nerves, and fat.
Jun 4, 2020
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